Here's a detail that I missed:
Felix now holds the record for shortest time for an Atlantic storm to intensify to Category 5 strength. Felix required just 51 hours to reach Category 5 strength after it started as a tropical depression. That is a truly remarkable intensification rate, considering most tropical cyclones take 3-5 days to organize into a Category 1 hurricane.
As I said in my last post--you can look at these anomalies and just shrug, but Thomas Kuhn knew well that if you get enough anomalies, you sometimes get a paradigm shift.
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51 hours from inception to 5 is impressive enough, but most of that time was spent building up from depression to 2. The really scary speed was from Cat 2 to Cat 5 in just several hours!
Chris,
If a paradigm shift happens, you won't have to point it out.
I know you don't mean to be self-serving, and I agree that the data are suggestive of a climate transition, but this post has a bit too much of that look-what-I-discovered flavor.
Perhaps you need to re-frame your comments :)
In the buisness of weather, we donote anything that intensifies at a rate of 2hPa/hour (mBar in silly units) "explosive" development... otherwise known as a bomb.
Felix intensified at a rate of 3.4hPa/hour. That's almost twice our usual criteria for rapid intensification. This storm is really something else.
It's a long time since I read Kuhn, but isn't the point that anomalies left to themselves *don't* trigger paradigm shifts -- that normal science can continue unabated despite effectively any number of such things. Indeed, IIRC it's the lack of any internal account for the paradigm shift, anomaly based or otherwise, that sits at the heart of a) the notion of incommensurability and b) the love/hate relationship between Kuhn and SSK.