Comments on: Are We In for a Busy 2008 Hurricane Season?

By: Weather Nerd » Kyle causes little damage; Laura forms

Weather Nerd » Kyle causes little damage; Laura forms — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:10:22 +0000

[...] repeatedly, as stating that seasonal hurricane forecasts are overhyped and overrated — the consensus was that we’d have between 11 and 16 named storms, between 6 and 9 hurricanes, and between 2 [...]

By: Weather Nerd » Quiet again in the tropics

Weather Nerd » Quiet again in the tropics — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 03:20:34 +0000

[...] just FYI, so you can check your conspiracy theories at the door). Personally, as I’ve said before, I don’t think these sorts of seasonal forecasts are of much value. Nobody knows for sure [...]

By: Weather Nerd » Greetings from the Weather Nerd!

Weather Nerd » Greetings from the Weather Nerd! — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:54:04 +0000

[...] year and Hurricane Bertha this year, as well as articles wrapping up the 2007 hurricane season and previewing the 2008 season. But those were just appetizers. Now that I have my own PajamasXpress blog, [...]

By: Brendan Loy Asks Are We in for a Busy Hurricane Season? | ...gettingpaidtowatch :: A New York Mets Blog

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:52:01 +0000

[...] blogging about Katrina in his blog, The Irish Trojan, He now writes occassionally on Hurricanes at Pajamas Media. [...]

By: Pajamas Media » Are We In For a Busy Hurricane Season?

Pajamas Media » Are We In For a Busy Hurricane Season? — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:27:02 +0000

[...] Only time will tell whether Bertha is truly a harbinger of things to come, but at least for now, you can add this unusual early-July monster to the list of reasons why the seasonal forecasters might just be right this time. [...]

By: Jack Olson

Jack Olson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:38:16 +0000

Yesterday I was in the lobby of a Chase bank here in Houston. I noticed a sign about hurricane preparedness. I assumed they were going to offer the typical advice, to store canned food, flashlights, and batteries. Instead, they recommended that each of us prepare for the next big storm by taking out a home equity line of credit. Boy, if only the citizens of New Orleans had thought of that! Then, when Katrina hit, their houses would have been “under water” figuratively as well as literally.

By: burt

burt — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 02:25:58 +0000

“Such relatively short-period events (Sahara dust storms) are a major reason why it is reasonable to expect that annual hurricane predictions may be less accurate than, for example, predictions of the Earth’s average temperature over the course of a decade or a century.” A major short term event, the eruption of Tambora, two hundred years ago caused a very serious decrease of average global temperature over a span of a decade. The worst year was so cold that people starved in New England because there was no successful growing season.

By: nobozons

nobozons — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:58:40 +0000

Don’t forget the global cooling. We may have turned the corner of large and frequent hurricanes for a while. Ocean temperatures are down. This is the year to heart land floods. Yet another part of the country that is an insurance night mare.

By: David Gillies

David Gillies — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 22:57:28 +0000

For those of a statistical bent, it is instructive to grab a list of hurricane frequencies over the last, say, sixty years, bin them into a histogram and overlay a Poisson distribution with the same mean as the frequency data (appropriately vertically scaled, of course). The fit is really good.

There were 371 named hurricanes in the 60 years 1948-2007. For a Poisson distribution with mean lambda events in a given time interval, the PDF of getting k events in the interval is (lambda^k exp(-lambda)/k! (this is the continuous version). Here, we have lambda=371/60 = 6.18. Scaling by 60 for the number of years’ worth of data we have and superimposing the plot over the histogrammed data shows that hurricane frequencies are as near as dammit random. A linear fit to the time series data gives a VERY weak upward trend which would be nearly eliminated by a few years of low activity.

Statistics as weak as these being used to bolster any kind of alarmism have the scent of voodoo about them.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:37:48 +0000

If you recall, NOAA did not start this. I think the NHC was reluctant to get into this business of a seasonal forecast. But, given all of the attention that the MSM gave Dr. Gray, they bowed to public pressure. The simple fact is that they (NHC) is completely aware of how the MSM is going to hype and distort the meaning of their product. Having been in the weather business for over 35 years, I know that anything I tell the media will inevitably be misrepresented either for ratings or simply due to ignorance. In an attempt to find the perfect sound-bite or headline accuracy is sacrificed for convenience.