The calm *blog* before the storm...

The standard advice about starting any writing endeavour is to write about what you know. Well, I’m here to use this blog to learn more about the complex issue of climate change, so that leaves me somewhat limited, but since no journey starts without a first step my starting point will be storms.

Now, I’m not talking about your everyday ‘it’s a bit blowy outside’ kind of storms, but instead I mean the big ones, the rare beasts that wreak havoc to those in their path, with impacts that spread way beyond those who are unlucky enough to be directly in the firing line.

In a changing climate, extreme storms are expected to also change in terms of their frequency and severity, but there is much uncertainty. It’s not just the storms themselves that are likely to change. In the future our exposure and vulnerability to their impacts will also evolve. How these factors interlink, and exactly how extreme storms are likely to change, are subjects of much debate and a key question in the field of climate change science. A warmer world is expected to change how often we see storms like Hurricanes Katrina which ravaged an ill-prepared New Orleans, or Hurricane Sandy which flooded much of the east coast of the U.S. including New York  (comparison before and after images on this link - worth a look). Then there are clusters of windstorms like Lothar and Martin that hit Europe just after Christmas in 1999 causing billions of Euros in insured losses, let alone the amount of uninsured damage, which may also change in frequency in the future (the subject of a future blog I'm sure). Storms like Super Typhoon Haiyan caused immeasurable suffering and loss in the Philippines in 2013. Tragic loss of life reached into the thousands, and the huge amount of damage was largely uninsured with government responses barely able to help those affected and international aid being a large source of the relief. This highlights the global differences in vulnerability to these extreme events. However, in the context of climate change, the often-asked questions are: “Can ‘storm x’ be attributed to climate change?” or “Are we likely to see more storms similar to ‘storm x’?” Not easy questions to address, but so in this blog I’ll be searching for the answers that are out there (if any), and look at various sides of the science in a quest to respond to these very reasonable questions.

Hurricane Katrina on its way towards New Orleans. Source: NASA

With those sobering thoughts in mind, I intend to use this blog as an exploration into what we know about tropical cyclones and their relationships to climate in the past, present and future. From palaeotempestology looking back thousands of years, to high resolution climate modelling out to 2100, I’ll be bringing together interesting facts, reviewing papers, and hopefully bringing out some entertaining and engaging moments along the way.

Perhaps just a quick word about me before we get going, for the sake of good manners. I’ve just started a part-time Masters degree in Climate Change (hence this blog), but also work full time coordinating and leading research projects for a large insurance/reinsurance broker. My background is in meteorology having worked for over a decade as a weather forecaster in the UK and in Bermuda (I wanted to forecast hurricanes).

I also have an interest in the communication of science having worked in the media side of forecasting at the start of my career, and studied at art college before moving on to a BSc in Environmental Science at the turn of the millennium. So basically, I’m a self-confessed weather geek, who likes paintings and films. I've contributed to my company's blog a few times, but never run my own site, so I'll hopefully build some good content on this page as I go along.

I'm always happy to receive comments about the weather and climate, especially severe storms, so feel free to reply on any posts and I'll respond as soon as I can.