Either way, you can't blame the Fed for this one...

A Houston Chronicle article alleges tropical storm inflation:

With another hurricane season set to end this Friday, a controversy is brewing over decisions of the National Hurricane Center to designate several borderline systems as tropical storms.

Some meteorologists, including former hurricane center director Neil Frank, say as many as six of this year's 14 named tropical systems might have failed in earlier decades to earn "named storm" status.

"They seem to be naming storms a lot more than they used to," said Frank, who directed the hurricane center from 1974 to 1987 and is now chief meteorologist for KHOU-TV. "This year, I would put at least four storms in a very questionable category, and maybe even six."

Most of the storms in question briefly had tropical storm-force winds of at least 39 mph. But their central pressure — another measure of intensity — suggested they actually remained depressions or were non-tropical systems.

I don't know what to think of these allegations. It doesn't seem the National Hurricane Center (particularly Dr. Chris Landsea) has generally been acting as a partisan global warming advocate -- in the same way, for example, NASA JPL's James Hansen has been.

But they've also recently been put under new leadership, and I'm sure the alleged change (if real) would contribute to this sort of impression:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of tropical storms developing annually in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled over the past century, with the increase taking place in two jumps, researchers say. The increases coincided with rising sea surface temperature, largely the byproduct of human-induced climate warming, researchers Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster concluded.

This charge reminds me of earlier charges (leveled in The American Thinker and by Steve McIntyre) of temperature-measurement inflation. See the stunningly absurd examples at surfacestations.org, including stations on (hot) asphalt parking lots, on roofs (!), and at least one in front of an air conditioner output vent!

In that case (o make a long story short) NASA's JPL claimed they compensated for these sorts of errors. But, as one of McIntyre's comments alludes, problems apparently still exist:

Orland is a pristine rural site that has remained unchanged for many years. The observations show no warming. It is shocking that the adjusted Orland data shows a strong warming trend. It tells me the adjustments are wrong and the adjusted data cannot be trusted.

I'm sure time (though possibly not the mainstream media) will reveal if there are similar systemic errors in tropic storm measurement.