On the maximum observed wind speed in a randomly sampled hurricane

Abstract

There is considerable interest in detecting a long-term trend in hurricane intensity possibly related to large-scale ocean warming. This effort is complicated by the paucity of wind speed measurements for hurricanes occurring in the early part of the observational record. Here, results are presented regarding the maximum observed wind speed in a sparsely randomly sampled hurricane based on a model of the evolution of wind speed over the lifetime of a hurricane.