Ancient Hurricanes

While searching throught the oceans channel link on Cathy's blog, I came accross an article that looked interesting to me. This article was all about how Ancient hurricanes can be used to presict the probablility of a certain magnitude hurrican occuring in the future. The part that I fund extremly interesting was their methodology for conducting this research. Basically they already had data showing hurricanes of the last 150 years but after hurricane Katrina, the notion of a category 5 hurricane making landfall on a place such as New Orleans along the gulf became a concern. The facts hurrican Katrina was a category 3 and no category 5 storm has made landfall around the gulf as far back as history can tell us (150 years). However Dr. Liu wanted to know what occured in the time before that with regards to the storm. This was accomplished by "pulling sediment cores from coastal lakes and analyzing the sand layers might give us the information" (http://www.ocean.com/article.asp?locationid=1&resourceid=7778&ProdId=&CatId=1&TabID=&SubTabID=), this along with things such as radiocarbon analysis allowed it to be shown roughly when hurricanes of certain magnitudes hav occured. The result 10-12 category 5 storms in the last 3,800 years. This means we have a percent chance of having a category 5 reach landfall along the gulf at a rate of 0.3 percent each year. WOW

Link: http://www.ocean.com/article.asp?locationid=1&resourceid=7778&ProdId=&CatId=1&TabID=&SubTabID=