Entries Tagged as 'Hurricane Forecasts'
3 June 2008 · Comments Off
It’s a good time of the year to be in the random number generation business. From Business Insurance:
Atlantic hurricane activity will be 20% above average this year, Tropical Storm Risk predicted Monday.
The London-based forecasting consortium in April had predicted a season 35% above the 1950-2007 norm. But in a statement announcing Monday’s prediction, TSR said: "The lowering of the forecast is due to the unexpected rapid waning of La Niña conditions now occurring in the tropical Pacific. However, uncertainties remain, and La Niña and other key climate factors will be closely monitored."
Tags:
Weather · Hurricane Forecasts
15 October 2007 · Comments Off
Seen in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Dr William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, told a packed lecture hall at the University of North Carolina that humans were not responsible for the warming of the earth.[...]
“We’re brainwashing our children,” said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. “They’re going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It’s ridiculous.”
But Dr Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicised, said a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures - related to the amount of salt in ocean water - was responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.
However, he said, that same cycle meant a period of cooling would begin soon and last for several years.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the quote oversimplifies what some folks have suggested—that while longer term global warming (whether natural or human driven) is likely occurring, the recent hyped weather oddities could be the result of shorter-term cycles.
If that were to hold true, then when the shorter-term cycles flip over to more normal modes, would popular media and junk science begin to consider the concerns of longer term climate changes to be bunk due simply to lack of understanding of how the different cycles and trends interact with one another?
Tags:
Global Warming · Dr Gray · Global Warming · Hurricane Forecasts
5 October 2007 · Comments Off
I know; I really shouldn’t be so irreverent as to refer to seasonal hurricane forecasts as “random number generators”. However, given the wide range of variability that exists with the forecasts and their accuracy, I can’t resist.
Seen in Insurance Journal:
The final months of the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season are expected to experience above-average activity, forecasters at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins, Colo., are predicting.
According to its latest forecast, the two-month period of October-November is expected to experience a total of four named storms. The CSU team had predicted five named storms with their earlier October-November predictions, but they downgraded the forecast slightly to four named storms with two becoming hurricanes with their latest update.
The article points to the emergence of a La Niña pattern as suppressing wind shear, making it easier for tropical weather systems in the Atlantic to hold together and blossom into storms.
I’ll still keep my fingers crossed that it remains a relatively quiet year on the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts, however.
Tags:
Weather · Dr Gray · Hurricane Forecasts · Tropical Storms
