Tropical Storms

Random number generators work differently on the other side of the pond, it seems.

The UK’s Met Office has released their updated 2008 Tropical Storm Forecast.

They’re calling for 7-13 (point estimate: 10) named storms this season (as compared to an average of 12.4), predicting a cooling trend in Atlantic SST’s.

That’s significantly less than the other major predictions made, where the consensus was for an above-average year.

I suppose that in about 6 months we’ll know whose model was more accurate this year.

Bill Proenza is apparently taking heat for pointing out that a key element in monitoring tropical weather is failing. From the Miami Herald:

The new director of the National Hurricane Center, an outspoken critic of his superiors since he took over in January, charged Friday night that they are trying to muzzle him and could be setting him up for termination.

Bill Proenza said the acting director of the National Weather Service, Mary Glackin, visited his office in West Miami-Dade Friday and handed him a three-page letter of reprimand.[...]

In recent interviews with The Miami Herald and other media, Proenza has strongly criticized leaders of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign while hurricane forecasters deal with budget shortfalls.

One of his main concerns has been the imminent demise of a key weather satellite called QuikScat, launched in 1999 and long past its designed lifetime.

While I can definitely empathize with the notion that subordinates are supposed to be subordinate to the wishes of their bosses (or walk away), I admire Proenza’s chutzpah for sticking to his guns.

Trying to silence him, while perhaps appropriate but for the context, looks bad because of the context.

Perhaps the NWS would be better served by issuing its own statement, if there is actually some reasonable explanation for spending money on PR rather than research and storm-tracking.

Seen at Insurance Journal:

Officials for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which administers the NFIP, told GAO staffers the they do not have authority to collect wind damage claims data from [Write-Your-Own] insurers, even when the insurer services both the wind and flood policies on the same property.

“As a result, for hurricane-damaged properties, such as those damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, NFIP does not have all the information it needs to ensure that its claims payments were limited to damage caused by flooding,” the GAO found. “Concerns over the processing of these flood claims are heightened when the same insurance company serves as both NFIP’s WYO insurer and the property-casualty (wind) insurer for a given property. In such cases, the same company is responsible for determining damages and losses to itself and to NFIP, creating a potential conflict of interest.”

Even though most of the insurance industry folks I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with have been fine, upstanding folks who seem to do a pretty good job of balancing fairness with profit pressures, I think it might be understandable if some additional bureaucracy and recordkeeping were introduced here.

Seen on the AP wires:

An aging weather satellite crucial to accurate predictions on the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any moment and plans to launch a replacement have been pushed back seven years to 2016.[...]

If the satellite faltered, experts estimate that the accuracy of two-day forecasts would suffer by 10 percent and three-day forecasts by 16 percent, which could translate into miles of coastline and the difference between a city being evacuated or not.[...]

QuikScat, launched in 1999 and designed to last two to three years, provides key data on wind speed and direction over the ocean. Weather aircraft and buoys can also obtain similar measurements near a storm, but they do not provide a constant flow of data as QuikScat does.

Last year, the satellite suffered a major setback — the failure of a transmitter used to send data to Earth about every 90 minutes. Now the satellite is limping along on a backup transmitter and has other problems.

The article mentions that an additional wrinkle in the situation is that the replacement satellite is allegedly less precise than the current one.

I suppose, in the interest of finding a silver lining in this hurricane prediction cloud, I could point out that increased evacuations should provide an additional disincentive to living in storm-prone areas, hopefully weakening demand for properties in those areas, and thereby easing pressure on property insurance rates due to the growth in cat risk.

Sadly, I suspect a more realistic outcome is that there will be an increased likelihood of folks becoming desensitized to storm evacuation orders, leading to increased casualties.

It’s the official start of the Atlantic tropical storm season, and we have a bouncing baby tropical storm by the name of Barry.

I can’t help but notice that as of this writing, Barry is forecast to pass awfully close to the site of the Okefenokee Swamp wildfire.

If I’m not mistaken, folks have been hoping for a little rain….

Seen on the AP wire:

With the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season a few hours away, researcher William Gray released his newest forecast Thursday still showing an expectation for 17 named storms and nine hurricanes, five of them intense.

Meanwhile, to add a bit more punch to the reminder that tomorrow is the official start of storm season ‘07, Dr. Masters notes that something’s brewing in the Caribbean:

A large area of disturbed weather developed over the Western Caribbean last night. This disturbance is bringing winds of up to 55 mph over the ocean, according to the 7:07am EDT pass of the QuikSCAT satellite. The NOAA Buoy off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula recorded winds this morning at 30mph, gusting to 35mph. There is no circulation evident on QuikSCAT or satellite loops, but the disturbance does have the potential to develop into a tropical depression by Saturday as it moves to the northeast over Western Cuba and South Florida. A Hurricane Hunter aircraft is scheduled to investigate the system at 2pm EDT on Friday.

Dr. Masters also offers a wrap up of the major Atlantic storm forecasts:

• CSU: 17 named storms, 9 hurricanes, 5 cat 3+’s
• TSR, Inc: 16 named storms, 9 hurricanes, 4 cat 3+’s
• NOAA: 13-17 named storms, 7-10 hurricanes, 3-5 cat 3+’s

And just remember: for the next few months, within the hallowed halls of insurance home offices around the country, the large property underwriters and cat modelers will be easy to identify, as the folks looking a little concerned, with bitten-off fingernails, and muttering about the most recent updates from the National Hurricane Center.

From Jeff Master’s blog at Weather Underground:

The NOAA team predicts a very high (75% chance) of an above-normal hurricane season, a 20% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5% chance of a below-normal season. They expect 13-17 named storms, 7-10 hurricanes, and 3-5 major hurricanes (a normal season has 10-11 named storm, 6 hurricanes, and 2 intense hurricanes).

Dr. Masters goes on to mention that the long-range forecasts for early June are starting to come out, and that he doesn’t see anything too out of the ordinary, as compared to a couple of hurricane seasons where unusual weather configurations lead to more storms than normal being steered towards the U.S. coast.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that such normality will prevail into the height of hurricane season in August and September.

While in this part of the world, we’re ramping up for an Atlantic hurricane season that’s expected to be more active than normal, that won’t be the case in the Western Pacific, if a random-number generator in Hong Kong is to be believed. Per Jeff Master’s blog

It’s going to be a below-average typhoon season in the Western Pacific, according to the April 23, 2007 forecast issued by Dr. Johnny Chan of the City University of Hong Hong. Dr. Chan is calling for 25 named storms and 14 typhoons in 2007, slightly below the average of 27 named storms and 17 typhoons.

So, I’m sitting in the waiting room while my wife is in surgery, being turned into a cyborg, when I notice on the TV playing in the room that Andrea has been named.

True, she’s only a subtropical storm, but it’s still a bit early in the year to be naming storms. Welcome to storm season ‘07, I guess.

While I was grabbing reading material this morning, I noticed that Reuters has a nice round-up of the random-number generator outputs so far:

Overall, the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season will bring 13 to 14 named storms, of which six or seven could strike the United States, AccuWeather said.[...]

“The probabilities for this year are well above average,” Klotzbach said. “The idea is, with a more active season, there is a much higher possibility of landfall.”

[The Colorado State team] already has predicted the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season would be far more active than usual, with 17 tropical storms, of which nine will strengthen into hurricanes and five will strengthen into major hurricanes.

Looks like the National Hurricane Center had to warm up their notification service a little earlier than planned:

A NON-TROPICAL LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM…CENTERED ABOUT 230 MILES
EAST-SOUTHEAST OF THE GEORGIA AND SOUTH CAROLINA COASTS…HAS BEEN
MOVING SLOWLY WESTWARD AT 5 TO 10 MPH. THIS SYSTEM IS PRODUCING
GALE-FORCE WINDS AND HEAVY SURF ALONG THE COASTS OF NORTH
CAROLINA…SOUTH CAROLINA…AND GEORGIA…WITH STRONGER WINDS
OFFSHORE. ASSOCIATED SHOWER ACTIVITY HAS INCREASED SINCE
YESTERDAY…BUT NO SIGNIFICANT STRENGTHENING OF THIS SYSTEM IS
EXPECTED. THE LOW IS BEING MONITORED FOR SIGNS OF TROPICAL OR
SUBTROPICAL CYCLONE DEVELOPMENT…AND AN AIR FORCE RESERVE
RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT WILL BE AVAILABLE TO INVESTIGATE THE SYSTEM
TOMORROW MORNING…IF NECESSARY.