The birth of storms is called cyclogenesis.
Modern meteorology emphasises the behaviour of events in the upper atmosphere as the start of a cyclone. I think the reason behind that is that fluid mechanics is so difficult to master and techniques employing it in forecasting are so liable to go wrong that using regions where so little happens makes matching sequences with past events a lot easier.
So they run a model out and using methods I don’t know about, manage to find previous runs that look exactly the same. Since they know what weather happened on those dates, they can guess it will go that way again.
Of course it stands to reason that they are likely to be right. The fact that non weather related phenomena can occur and change the weather makes such forecasting methods inaccurate to a certain extent. I don’t think I can say any more about that.
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What I have noticed is that tropical storms that occur in near equatorial regions tend to run their course and die. A short time later another matching set of storms appears further down the planet.
I am speaking of the southern hemisphere. It is a phenomena I have only just noticed. I believe I noticed it at the end of the last northern hemisphere’s tropical storm season. This ended in November/December 2013.
I noticed it again with the recent sequence (previous to Ian and Colin.) And now in the middle of this present one I am able to say that the two super-typhoons Ian and Colin will deflate shortly and be taken down to the archives and become consigned to the history books.
But looking at the Australian chart BoM for 13 January 2014 (images to be added later) we can see that the storm Ian at least makes its appearance and fades into the background.
What happens next is that the cyclones surrounding Antarctica grow very large and around them a number or isobars (regions of equal pressure) form a ring parallel to the coastline of Antarctica.
This is a signal that another storm is going to grow. Colin will join in shortly and then the significance of the signal will become apparent. When the region of parallel isobars stretches some distance around the continent it indicates a multiplicity of storms. When the belt of parallel lines is wide, such storms will be very violent.
It remains to be seen why the last two storms Ian and Colin were not accompanied by very violent volcanic activity. There is usually violent volcanic activity when two such storms reach Cat 3 or greater. But I think it fair to assume that with the next two (or more) storms, there will be that high VEI.
