Land falling tropical storms of 2008:
* = U.S. landfall
Tropical Storm Arthur struck Belize on May 31, where it caused severe flooding, killed five people, and caused $78 million of damage.
* Hurricane Dolly struck the Yucatan Peninsula on July 21 and then struck South Padre Island, Texas, on July 31. It caused several deaths in Guatemala and more than $1 billion of damage in Texas.
* Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall near Port Arthur, Texas, on August 3. It dropped heavy rain of up to 6.5 inches in areas near Houston.
* Tropical Storm Fay formed in the Caribbean Sea and struck the island of Hispaniola and Cuba, then made the record books as the first recorded storm to make landfall four times in the state of Florida. Fay caused record levels of flooding in many parts of northern Florida, then moved westward into other Gulf Coast states. Fay became a tropical depression centered over southern Mississippi, and the National Weather Service issued flood watches and warnings for parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Fay dropped more than 27 inches of rain in some locations and set many new records for daily rainfall amounts. This demonstrates that hurricane-strength winds are not necessary for a tropical storm to become hugely disruptive.
* Hurricane Gustav struck Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica on August 27, killing at least 85 people. It later intensified to a category 4 hurricane just before striking Cuba. Gustav later made landfall in Louisiana, southwest of New Orleans, as a category 2 hurricane. Gustav avoided directly striking major population centers in the U.S. but caused severe flooding and wind damage in more rural areas.
* Hurricane Hanna briefly attained category 1 strength but spent most of its life as a strong tropical storm. It struck Haiti on September 1, dropping heavy rains and causing severe flooding and landslides that killed more than 500 people. Hanna was the deadliest tropical storm in the Atlantic so far this year. On September 6, Hanna made landfall in the U.S. near the South Carolina-North Carolina border and caused severe flooding in several states as it moved northward along the Atlantic Coast.
* Hurricane Ike made landfall in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos islands as a category 4 hurricane, causing devastation on some of the islands. Later, Ike made landfall as a category 3 hurricane in Haiti and Cuba, where it killed at least 82 people (mostly in Haiti). On September 13, Ike made landfall in Galveston, Texas, as a strong category 2 hurricane. Galveston and other coastal towns were devastated by wind and storm-surge damage. Wind damage was also severe in nearby Houston, where windows were blown out of downtown skyscrapers. The remnants of Ike remained intense as the system moved from Texas into the Midwest, causing severe flooding and wind damage in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, with large-scale power outages, damaged buildings, and severe crop damage. An estimated 4,000 cattle were killed in Texas, and rice and corn crops were severely damaged in several states. At least 63 deaths in the U.S. are blamed on Ike.
The severe destruction, economic losses, and deaths caused by Fay, Hanna, and Ike in the U.S. and elsewhere demonstrate that tropical storms do not have to make landfall as major hurricanes to cause severe and widespread damage. In 2008, land falling tropical storms have caused more than 1,000 confirmed fatalities throughout the North Atlantic region, as time passes it seems hurricanes are only getting stronger, which will lead to more deaths and more property damage.
Past Hurricane records:
One thing is for sure, we can't trust past records for accurately tracking the amount of hurricane's that have occurred before the 1980's, before this time methods of tracking and identifying hurricanes were not up to the standard that they are today and defiantly not on such a large scale. As more and more government agencies were created to track and monitor hurricane activity, it almost seemed that the amount of hurricanes and other such disasters had increased in the world – in fact this was just a result of more hurricanes being recorded, that’s to say that before 1980 there was probably just as many hurricanes are there are today, albeit slightly more due to global warming but they simply were not recorded for a variety of reasons ranging from total ignorance to the hazard, to conflicting reports about that problem. As more and more agencies are introduced, were getting closer to tracking every hurricane, and the introduction of new technology helps to such as satellites that can track global wind currents
What are El Niño and La Niña?
The term El Niño was first coined more than 100 years ago to describe the unusually warm waters that would occasionally form along the coast of Ecuador and Peru. This phenomenon typically occurred late in the calendar year near Christmas, hence the name El Niño (Spanish for "the boy child", referring to the Christ child). Today the term El Niño is used to refer to a much broader scale phenomenon associated with unusually warm water that occasionally forms across much of the tropical eastern and central Pacific. The time between successive El Niño events is irregular but they typically tend to recur every 3 to 7 years.
La Niña is the counterpart to El Niño and is characterized by cooler than normal SSTs across much of the equatorial eastern and central Pacific. A La Niña event often, but not always, follows an El Niño and vice versa. Once developed, both El Niño and La Niña events tend to last for roughly a year although occasionally they may persist for 18 months or more. El Niño and La Niña are both a normal part of the earth's climate and there is recorded evidence of their having occurred for hundreds of years.
Is global warming generating other types of severe weather?
Global temperature has increased and precipitation patterns have changed over the 20th century as a result of human-induced global warming, resulting in some increases in extremes of temperature and precipitation. According to the IPCC, “increases in the amount of precipitation are very likely in high-latitudes, while decreases are likely in most subtropical land regions,” and “it is very likely that hot extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to become more frequent.” Basically increasing sea temperatures caused by global warming lead to it a higher likelihood that the set of conditions required for a hurricane to form are met more frequently seen around the world – El Niño just exacerbates this problem as an already unusually hot ocean is just warmed even further…… you can think of global warming as an event that’s causing permanent El Niño conditions in areas of the world that are unprepared to deal with a large hurricane disaster, so its interesting for us to study El Niño as an model for a future global climate