Posted on 12/13/2011 7:20:20 AM PST by crusty old prospector
Two top U.S. hurricane forecasters, revered like rock stars in Deep South hurricane country, are quitting the practice because it doesn’t work.
William Gray and Phil Klotzbach say a look back shows their past 20 years of forecasts had no value.
The two scientists from Colorado State University will still discuss different probabilities as hurricane seasons approach — a much more cautious approach. But the shift signals how far humans are, even with supercomputers, from truly knowing what our weather will do next.
Gray, recently joined by Klotzbach, has been known for decades for an annual forecast of how many hurricanes can be expected each official hurricane season (which runs from June to November.) Southerners hang on his words, as even a mid-sized hurricane can cause billions in damage.
Last week, the pair dropped this announcement out of a clear, blue sky:
“We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year ... Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.”
They can’t predict hurricanes, but they KNOW that they are caused by Global Warming!
Of course they can’t predict Hurricanes George Bush took the hurricane machine that made Katrina back to Texas when he left office. :)
***I always knew their predictions were bogus. At least they are honest enough to admit it. ***
This was known several years ago when someone looked at all the predictions for the last 50 or so years and found all of them were basicly the same.
A “predictor” finally admitted they really did not know how many hurricanes would happen in a year.
A few mild hurricanes, and two, maybe three major ones, blah blah blah.
Oh boy, now the Ron Paul drones here on FR will pick up and run with that conspiracy. :)
Well, hello!! Who started the idea of playing Karnak with hurricanes? These are the people who can’t predict where its going to rain with any accuracy, and who are quick to tell us that weather ‘forecasting’ is an inexact science!
So they decided they could see into the FUTURE! Predict weather that doesn’t exist a year ahead??
We laugh at the ‘hurricane forecast’ in the Gulf South!
Because once they predict they HAVE to make their predictions valid-so they name every thunderstorm in the Atlantic or Gulf to make their ‘quota’!
It took them till now to realize they have been WRONG?
Sure, they can name 25 storms, but where are the major storms they predicted would hit the US this year?
They were WRONG!Their ‘seeing into the future’ is stupid!
Not to mention the sick fixation they have with hurricanes-and their desire to ALWAYS have us worried about them.
It’s just obsessive to talk hurricane season in December! Even if they were accurate, what are people supposed to DO about a storm that is going to form 9 months in the future??
Better they should concentrate on actual, current, weather. FOREcasting means ‘telling before’. If you can’t, accurately. do it you shouldn’t have the job. And if it can’t accurately be done, stop calling it FOREcasting.
Oooh, I’d like to bitchslap these guys into another dimension!
I think there must still be some grant money out there so they are going to switch to predicting the number of cold fronts and naming blizzards. “There will be 143 named cold fronts this year, with 24 Category Two blizzards on the Safari-Bart Simpson Scale and 5 Category One blizzards that will cause massive traffic snarls and power outages in the Northeast along with long lines at Home Depots across the Southeast as people stock up on generators, snow shovels, and candles. Women and minorities will be hit the hardest.”
A friend of mine does Disaster Mitigation for governments and industry. A lot of what he does is hurricane prediction, though mostly what kind of damage the storm will do when it hits, and how much cost it will be to clean up after. Insurance companies love this stuff.
Anyway, he does model storms and, is fairly accurate at it (much better than Dr.Grey anyway). It’s mostly where they are going to go over how many there will be.
How it works, I am not sure, I’m a librarian, not a molecular physicist. I know there is a lot of statistics based on past years involved, but, there is some modeling of actual water droplets in there also.
And yes, he has a LOT of computers in his office.
I believe Gray does not accept the global warming claims of the left.
By the way, what is a hindcast?
****Then, the Weather Channel babes would run with it to scare the masses for ratings. *****
I saw this on our local news and weather report back when the term “El Nino” became a hot buzzword.
In late October or early November a blizzard hit part of Kansas and Nebraska. Nothing strange for those areas at that time of year but our weather chick made the most of it.
Standing outside several hundred miles from the storm she said...”The question that is on everyone’s minds. (Then she looks at the camera with a look of terror on her face)...IS THIS EL NINO?”
I wanted to throw a boot through my TV.
Actually, I believe that the folks who predict hurricanes are among the most stringent deniers that they are so caused.
A hindcast is when you’re fishing and your lure gets stuck in the tree behind you on your backswing with the fishing pole. ;-P
I went for 9 days without power after Irene
When fishing, most of my forecasts end up as hindcasts and my forelashs always end up as backlashs.
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