re: Why are more Cat 4 storms making landfall in the USA?

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Lol that’s a bunch a bullshite

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Catastrophic hurricanes elude long-term forecasting, in part because their historic documentation dates back only 120 years - a span too short to reveal how often such storms tend to recur. Now. two scientists have found a way to extend that record backthousandsof years. Bytracingthe fingerprints that ancient hurricanes left in lake sediments near the Alabama coast, they have taken the first step toward calculating the risk of a devastating storm in that region.

We have reconstructed hurricane activities in that part of the Gulf [of Mexico] during the last 5,000 years," says geographer Kam-biu Liu of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Using radiocarbon dating to determine the age of hurricane sand deposits, Liu and graduate student Miriam L. Fearn found that extremely violent hurricanes have raced through the area about every 600 years. Given that the last such storm hit this region 770 years ago, "the Alabama coast is likely to be struck by a major hurricane within the next century," Liu says. He and Fearn describe their study in the September GEOLOGY.

Focusing on coastal Lake Shelby allowed them to date the ancient hurricanes to within 200 years, says Liu. Previously geologists looked at much older, mostly marine sediments that are often too perturbed for exact dating," he explains. Coastal lakes are better preserved and hold organic material that can be accurately dated, he says.

The researchers started out by locating the sand that Hurricage Frederick - a strong storm that struck in 1979 - had hurled away from beaches and into the lake. Guided by the appearance of the sand layer left by Frederick, they scanned lake sediment cores for older hurricane-sand strata. Then they radiocarbon-dated the older hurricanes, measuring the proportion of carbon-14 in the sediment layers around the sand.

These deposits must have stemmed from catastrophic hurricanes, Liu reasoned, because the winds managed to fling them into the middle of the lake-an area so far from the beaches that Frederick's sand deposits hadn't reached it.

Liu is now extending this pilot project to a dozen sites along the Gulf of Mexico, hoping to assemble an overall pattern of prehistoric hurricanes within the next two years.

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Better equipment/information to categorize the storms.

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they found that hurricanes have been relatively mild compared to just a couple thousand years ago.

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Changing the way they categorize it for media sensationalism and muh climate change.

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