If we’re being intellectually honest, then it’s time to face the uncertainty elephant in the room.
The models were totally wrong about Dorian in a number of ways... including the earlier ones that had it strike Alabama. The course estimates didn’t match reality at all until well past PR. The only model that got intensity right was dismissed as erroneous.
How is it that models that are sacrosanct on Sept 1 get a free pass for being totally wrong on Aug 30 and 29 and 28 and beyond? Where does that certainty level kick in, precisely, and why? This is the key question.
If you are a citizen of Alabama - not a decision maker in the federal bureaucracy - you haven’t done storm prep since Irma, most likely, so it makes sense with the large amount of tropical cyclones lined up and active. Nobody sent them the magic signal that the incorrect art of forecasting that showed them in the risk zone two days earlier suddenly became perfectly reliable against the storm when it said they no longer were at risk. Even though the media were relentlessly telling them that the forecast was particularly uncertain.
I struggle to even conceive a claim of harm to be derived from someone in Alabama responding to Trump’s message by preparing for a storm. Downside risks for a citizen failing to prepare are things like death and property destruction. For a citizen preparing the downside risks are spending a little more money now on supplies that will be useful at some point in the future anyway.
As far as the bosses in the bureaucracy are concerned, their reaction should be of no surprise at all. How would you feel if your subordinate set about to publicly correct the CEO and did not even clear it with you? This is a courtesy and respect issue within that bureaucracy. Line level workers shouldn’t be making political decisions on their own, it’s not team behavior at all.
There’s one more question raised by the level of certainty implied, which is why wasn’t Grand Bahama Island evacuated. Did the models predict it would sit on top of them for 40 hours with 185mph winds... and nobody staged an evacuation? Or is nobody responsible for the models in this case, where this level of certainty would essentially mean someone left all those people to die on purpose.
That is an EASY question to answer. The models for Dorian were bad BEFORE the G-IV flights started making the flights and dropping dropsondes into the atmosphere around Dorian on the 29th. Adding additional data points to the models helps with models resolution and it helped the models come up with a better solution. This is from the discussion at 5PM on the 29th:
"The National Weather Service has begun 6-hourly upper-air soundings across portions of the mid-Atlantic and southeastern United States. Six-hourly balloons are also being launched in Bermuda and Nassau in the Bahamas. A NOAA G-IV synoptic surveillance mission is ongoing, and the data from this flight will be assimilated into the 0000 UTC model cycle."
That 00Z model cycle would be for the models on the 30th. And if you will go back and LOOK at the forecasts - it was this additional data from the G-IV flights that helped that model data come to a BETTER solution.
THAT'S why you can trust those later models better than the earlier ones. The earlier models were steering the storm with a ridge based on largly unknown intensity. Once the G-IV missions started, it made MANY samples of the atmosphere from the surface to 50K feet and took that data and put it into the global models - ALL around the system. The global models THEN realized the ridge to the north of Dorian wasn't as strong as they had previously thought it was and thus recurved the storm.
See - this is a little more complicated than you think it is...and there are ACTUAL answers going on behind the scenes. Perhaps people who make forecasts know what they are doing. Just because you can pull some maps doesn't mean you know what you are looking at or even how the data is being produced. If you did - you would have actually known the answer to that question. Stop before you get further behind.
The NWS forecasts for yesterday and today here in New England were totally wrong, based on a misperception of the location and effect of Dorian. The forecasts just aren't as good as NWS would like everyone to believe in a lot of weather circumstances.