From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

They must be getting very desperate now to clock up some more “hurricanes” before the Atlantic hurricane season peters out for good!

Karen is not a hurricane or even a tropical storm or depression. Yet it will still appear as a named storm for the hurricane season, which will be emblazoned across the media at the end of November.

You might of course wonder why there was no mention of this one a day or so ago! This is because it did no even exist, not even as an embryo!

It was formally recognised early this morning and is expected to dissipate tomorrow.

It is not a tropical storm at all but a “subtropical storm”, a sort of hybrid, but in reality just a common or garden storm that we get every autumn. Its sustained winds won’t get above a paltry 45 mph:

As the technical blurb indicates, nobody would have know Karen was there had it not been for multiple satellite images.

Moreover NOAA only officially began naming subtropical storms in 2002, thus artificially increasing the number of named storms. They can also potentially get included in ACE statistics.

But it all goes to help the “hurricanes are getting more frequent” mantra!