I like Bastardi (and he's no liberal) as he's not afraid to go out on a limb on his forecasting. Fortunately, he is sometimes spectacularly wrong and I'm hoping this is one of those times.
BTW, speaking of Bastardi, I used to subscribe to his blog on AccuWeather for $5 a month. Now he is over at WeatherBell and charging $160 a year. That seems to be a bit steep to me just to get a blog. Does anybody get his WeatherBell blog and if so, is it worth it?
I do not subscribe to his blog but he is on Twitter and Facebook.
Joe has a twitter account I have been watching all day.
It won't take a Cat-5 to drive the RNC convention off the front pages.
A Cat-up-a-tree would suffice.
“Fortunately, he is sometimes spectacularly wrong...”
He is an alarmist and usually gives the worst possible case. I don’t listen to him here on the Outer Banks of NC. I usually check with the www.skeetobiteweather.com web site. They are usually accurate with HC tracking.
I agree; $160 is too much to pay for a weather blog. However, a lot of corporations pay big bucks for the private forecasts offered by Bastardi and his firm, WeatherBell. True, they sometimes go out on a limb, but you don’t keep Fortune 500 clients without a strong track record. From what I hear, WeatherBell has a rather impressive customer list, and Bastardi took some big accounts with him when he left Accu-Weather.
If you want a good barometer of where the storm is going (and how bad it’s going to be), talk to someone in logistics who works for Lowe’s, Home Depot, or Wal-Mart. Those companies have a long track record of getting needed items to their stores in the impact zone before and immediately after the storm. If you’re on/near the Gulf Coast, and see a lot of trucks from those stores in your area, or staging within 100 miles of the coast, you can expect the worst from Isaac.
After Katrina, some academics did a study of the government response to the storm versus the Wal-Mart response. Naturally, the company was far more efficient at anticipating where the need would be the greatest, and getting essential items to their stores in those areas.