Posted on 11/30/2007 8:27:21 AM PST by grundle
FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- Weather researcher William Gray said Tuesday the 2007 hurricane season was less active than his team predicted, with six hurricanes developing in the Atlantic instead of the nine initially forecast.
Cooler water and the presence of wind shears in the central tropical Atlantic made this an average season instead of the above-average year the team expected, said Phil Klotzbach, a member of Gray's team at Colorado State University.
Cooler temperatures inhibit hurricane formation, and wind shears can tear developing hurricanes apart.
Gray has been forecasting hurricanes for more than two decades, and his predictions for the June-November season are watched closely by emergency responders and others in coastal areas.
It's the second straight year the team predicted more hurricanes than actually occurred. Last year, Gray's initial forecast in April predicted 17 named storms, including nine hurricanes, five of them intense. The season produced just nine named storms, including five hurricanes, two of them major.
This year, Gray's April and June forecasts both predicted 17 named storms, including nine hurricanes, five of them major. In August, the team lowered that forecast to 15 named storms, including eight hurricanes, four of them major.
Instead, the year produced 14 named storms, including six hurricanes, two of them major. That's considered average compared with the 1950-2000 period, Klotzbach said.
"The reasons for this year's average season are challenging to explain," Klotzbach said in a written statement.
"It is impossible to understand how all these processes interact with each other to 100 percent certainty. Continued research should help us better understand these complicated atmospheric-oceanic interactions."
Klotzbach says that in seven of the past nine years, the team correctly predicted whether the season would be above or below average.
And yet they want us to spend hundreds of trillions of dollars to terraform the planet because there's a "consensus" about anthropogenic global warming. Pfft.
William Gray is actually a global warming “doubter”, bless his heart.
—I wish Gray was better at this—he is a leading skeptic on the “global warming” garbage—
It’s so funny isn’t it? Scientists can’t even predict the Atlantic hurricane season with any accuracy, yet know everything there is to know about how climate change will destroy planet.
Bullseye of the Year.
You mean the computer models were wrong? Shocking!!!
The forecast is wrong most years. That’s the nature of the beast.
If they can’t accurately predict what will happen months from now, how on earth do they think they can accurately predict what will happen 50 years from now.
“Klotzbach says that in seven of the past nine years, the team correctly predicted whether the season would be above or below average.”
Is he saying they predicted the severity of the 2005 season?
Which just goes to show the arrogance of so-called scientists driven by a political agenda.
Dr. Bill Gray and the NOAA forecasters who forecast high hurricane activity this year ARE NOT WARMISTS. (thus the parenthetical addition to this thead title is wrong as well.)
Bill Gray is a repeated and fanatical OPPONENT of the idea that the high activity and destruction of 2004/2005 had ANYTHING to do with "Global Warming." He doesn't believe GW will happen, and he's gotten into screaming arguments at scientific conferences with GW advocates and people blaming hurricanes on GW.
I personally attended a lecture where the NWS scientist, Gerry Bell, that does the NOAA hurricane forecast was asked by a couple of Goth-looking early 20 year olds if Katrina was caused by Global Warming, and he was emphatic he felt we were just in a normal up-cycle. The two young idiots kept trying to get him to say it was GW, and they looked like they were going to cry because he wouldn't.
If you wanted to be nearly 100% accurate, issue a new forecast on November 15th by simply counting the storms up to that point!
He’s a doubter? Wow! I didn’t know that. Thanks for telling me.
Thanks for post 15.
The Hurricane Center is so desperate for storms, that they are now naming winds of 35mph as “sub-tropical storms”. West Texas calls those winds a calm day.
Failed politician trumps science on every front.
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