Our region has experienced many high impact storms over the years, and a frequent question is, are there more storms nowadays than there used to be? This has been a difficult question to answer, because people differ on what they mean by storms. And from the weather side, there hasn't been a standard way to keep track of storms.
Now this has been done as part of specific research projects, but not in a sustained way. While people's opinions still differ, we now have a public set of storm accounting that allows us to develop ways of looking at storminess over the decades across any given region. For the northern Bering and southern Chukchi region, it turns out that the number of moderate to strong storms per season does not show any trend in the spring, summer or fall, but the number of storms in mid winter has increased significantly since 1970.
Our next question will be, are the number of storms in the Bering Sea and North Pacific increasing as well, or are just more storms moving into higher latitudes? Answers to these kinds of questions are important as we plan for a potentially stormier future.
