The RI Interrogator
Every rapid intensification in the official best tracks since 1978 — a rise of 30 kt or more in 24 hours — put to the independent evidence: what the aircraft measured, what the satellites saw, what the climatlas Best Track made of it, the environment it happened in and the imagery.
How independently is each one known?
A verdict from the independent voices alone
Independent support for the book's rapid intensifications, by basin and era
Share of each basin's episodes by verdict (count at the right). Hover a segment for the numbers. The table below lists every episode.
The 2005 question
More rapid intensification in the books since 2005: the storms, the imagery, or the writing?
Rapid intensification per storm-day, each source against its own 1989–2004 rate
RI episodes per 100 storm-days at tropical-storm strength, divided by the same source's 1989–2004 rate (so 1.0 = no change; the sources differ in level — 10-minute agencies use a 25-kt threshold — and only the shape is comparable). Whiskers: storm-block bootstrap 90%. Hover a point for the rates.
Every episode
Find one
Every voice through the episode
What the smoother decided
Top: the probability, at each 3-hour step, that the climatlas Best Track v0.6 took a large trend step there — where it concluded the storm was changing fast. Bottom: the probability it gave each satellite reading of being a gross failure (a pinhole eye the 8-km imagery cannot resolve, a misplaced centre) and so discounted it.