<$BlogRSDUrl$>

My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-08-06

Hurricane Forecast Lowered 

Hurricane researcher William Gray lowered his 2007 forecast slightly Friday, calling for 15 named storms, with eight becoming hurricanes and four of those becoming intense.

On May 31, at the outset of hurricane season, Mr. Gray had expected 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense.

“We've lowered our forecast from our May predictions because of slightly less favourable conditions in the tropical Atlantic,” said Philip Klotzbach, a member of Mr. Gray's team at Colorado State University.

The new forecast calls for three named storms, two hurricanes and one intense hurricane in August; five named storms, four hurricanes and two intense hurricanes in September; and five named storms, two hurricanes and one intense hurricane in October and November combined.

I'm really just posting this so that in November it's easy to go back and see how accurate these predictions really are.

Just for comparison, so far there have been (just doing the math) two named storms this season, neither of them hurricanes. This compares to the earlier prediction of four storms to this point, with one hurricane.

One would think, if this was a predictable effect of global warming, that it might be possible to get more of this right.

But the predictions seem to be a bit difficult to get right. For instance, last year the original forecast was for 13-16 named storms, with 8-10 hurricanes; in the end, there were 10 storms, five of them hurricanes.

I don't know about you, but I wish I had a job that allowed for a 38% margin of error.

So let's just watch and see what the reality ends up being in November. My point is, if the local news weather person can't get the weather right for tomorrow, and these advanced climatologists can't get it right for this season, what makes anybody think they can get it right for the next two decades?
Posted by: Michael / 8/06/2007 11:23:00 PM

Weblog Commenting by HaloScan.com

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?