{"id":17089,"date":"2016-04-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/live-hakamagwp.pantheonsite.io\/news\/spanish-empire-shipwrecks-offer-new-data-quest-understand-hurricanes"},"modified":"2021-05-21T10:27:55","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T17:27:55","slug":"spanish-empire-shipwrecks-offer-new-data-quest-understand-hurricanes","status":"publish","type":"custom_news","link":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/news\/spanish-empire-shipwrecks-offer-new-data-quest-understand-hurricanes\/","title":{"rendered":"Spanish Empire Shipwrecks Offer New Data in the Quest to Understand Hurricanes"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the Spanish Empire first reached the Caribbean, hundreds of their ships wrecked in the unfamiliar waters. Some, like Christopher Columbus\u2019s flagship Santa Mar\u00eda<\/em>, ran aground. Hundreds more were thrashed by hurricanes. Tropical storms took a devastating toll on the Spanish fleet, but now those wrecks\u2014and Spaniards\u2019 penchant for record keeping\u2014are offering scientists an opportunity to fill a critical hole in our understanding of how hurricanes work. In new research<\/a>, scientists have used these shipwrecks, along with other data, to reconstruct a detailed timeline of hurricane activity stretching back hundreds of years.<\/p>\n

Hurricane activity is far from steady. Over hundreds or thousands of years, the world\u2019s tropical regions will see peaks and valleys in hurricane formation<\/a> rates. Some years will be more active than others. Scientists are sure that this variability exists, but the amount of actual evidence of historical hurricanes is surprisingly weak. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s (NOAA) database of hurricane landfalls<\/a>, for instance, only goes back to 1851\u2014and for the first few decades, even those records are patchy. Some researchers have identified earlier hurricane activity by analyzing the sediment that ancient storms washed to shore, but those findings are very rough, often only accurate to the nearest century or so.<\/p>\n

That low-resolution timeline poses a serious problem. Climate change is set to alter where and how often hurricanes form, and how big they can grow. Computational climate models are scientists\u2019 best bet for estimating how these storms will change, but climate models are built on a bedrock of historical data. Computational models are essentially massive equations, representing the physics of how the climate works. But to test them, models\u2019 representations are compared against historical data. If the models\u2019 calculations don\u2019t align with what actually happened, the equations are sent back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n

\u201cGenerally, we don\u2019t know a lot about hurricanes in the past, which is problematic because if you want to make predictions about what\u2019s going to happen with future climate change, it\u2019s important to have a long time series,\u201d says Valerie Trouet<\/a>, a dendrochronologist (tree ring expert) at the University of Arizona.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Hurricane formation\u00a0can be affected by a range of factors, from\u00a0the temperature of the air and the sea\u00a0to the\u00a0wind speed at sea level and aloft, to the activity of the Sun. Photo by NASA JSC\/Michael Benson\/Kinetikon Pictures\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n

One night three years ago, over drinks at a convention in Tucson, Arizona, Trouet recalls devising a way to obtain a better long-term record of hurricane activity. Geographer\u00a0Grant Harley<\/a>\u00a0was convinced that he had identified a pattern in the rings of\u00a0slash pines<\/a>\u00a0in the Florida Keys that showed years when the trees\u2019 growth had been disrupted by terrible storms. He wondered whether that data could provide an unprecedentedly rich timeline of hurricanes going back to the early 1700s.<\/p>\n

Harley, Trout, and fellow dendrochronologist\u00a0Marta Dom\u00ednguez Delm\u00e1s<\/a>\u00a0became convinced they could demonstrate a link between Harley\u2019s pine trees and historical hurricane activity, if only they had a way to independently corroborate the relationship. That gave Trouet an idea: if they could find a historical record of shipwrecks, they could check whether more ships were lost in the years when the tree rings indicated intense hurricane activity.<\/p>\n

Trouet and her collaborators used ships\u2019 logs and other records to assemble a list of 657 Spanish vessels that had sunk in the Caribbean during hurricane season, either due to storms or for unknown reasons, between the years 1495 and 1825. They found that more ships\u00a0were lost during the years when Harley\u2019s tree rings suggested there had been greater storm activity.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Trouet,\u00a0the timeline of historical hurricane activity constructed by the researchers<\/a>\u00a0is the most detailed in existence for the time period\u2014and could be a boon to climate scientists.<\/p>\n

Some climate scientists are already paying attention. \u201cIf this result holds up with other methods for determining ancient hurricane activity, it would mean an important advance in our understanding of past climate and may help us to better anticipate future changes in hurricane activity,\u201d says Christopher Landsea, the science and operations officer at NOAA\u2019s National Hurricane Center.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Vecchi, the head of the Climate Variations and Predictability Group at NOAA, is also enthusiastic. \u201cThis is now a new, independent record,\u201d Vecchi says of the shipwreck data. \u201cWe can test new hypotheses against it, and see how consistent they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next step, Trouet says, is to look at the relationship between shipwrecks and storms in a larger geographical area.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do believe that it\u2019s possible to use shipwrecks from, say, the British Isles, to look at storm activity there,\u201d she says. \u201cOr even Asia.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Caribbean Sea shipwrecks\u00a0offer a high-resolution record of historical hurricane activity, which could be used to tune climate models.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12687,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"acf":{"hero_video_url":null,"hero_video_caption":"","deck":"Caribbean Sea shipwrecks\u00a0offer a high-resolution record of historical hurricane activity, which could be used to tune climate models.","authors_group":[{"by_group":"by","contributors_group":[15584]}],"word_count_override":"","podbean1":"","podbean2":"","redirect":"","geolocation":{"address":"20.648184, -72.31779","lat":20.648184,"lng":-72.31779},"related":[16813,16895],"twitterimage":13644,"facebookimage":13643,"twitterdescription":"","edited":"","factchecked":"","code":"","no_old_story_flag":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/custom_news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35250,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/17089\/revisions\/35250"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/16895"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/16813"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hakaimagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}