Les Jones

People are Noticing: Hurricane Predictions Useless

Saturday, May 31st, 2008 | Science |

AP - Hurricane season outlooks of little use:

But most years, they have published his forecasts with little or no commentary on his overall record - or even analysis of how he’d fared the season before. That is, until 2005.

That spring, Gray and Klotzbach forecast 15 named storms, eight of them hurricanes. Instead, there were a record 28 named storms in 2005, including 15 hurricanes - most notably Katrina. The following year, the team overestimated the storm activity. Instead of the predicted 17 storms and nine hurricanes, the final numbers that season were 10 and five.

Coincidentally, 2005 was also the year Xie and his students published a groundbreaking paper in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters.” In it, they suggested that the interplay of sea surface temperatures in the tropical North and South Atlantic, and not El Nino, was responsible for Florida’s disastrous 2004 season.

The following year, NC State felt confident enough to issue its forecast publicly. In a release, the university’s PR department would later crow that its “was the only national model to accurately forecast Atlantic hurricane activity” in 2006.

Unfortunately, NC State’s 2007 forecast was as off as anyone’s.

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