This is stupid. It’s not as if the chances of Alabama being hit by what was then a Cat 5 hurricane were zero on September 1st.
“This is stupid. It’s not as if the chances of Alabama being hit by what was then a Cat 5 hurricane were zero on September 1st.”
Exactly. There were many paths in the early stages of hurricane Dorian.
It was about as close to zero as you can get. Was it ZERO? No. But by advisory #33, at 11 AM on 1 Sept, the 6Z models had come out and every one of them had the recurve scenario. Even the ensembles of the global models had him recurving. There was not ONE model that put Alabama in ANY danger of damaging winds...not a single one.
I spent 32 years as a professional meteorologist....most of that time I spent it forecasting tropical cyclone impacts. It was a good forecast to say NO impacts give every shred of data available. Any forecaster that would have said "impacts were possible" would have just been playing it safe or playing politics and not making a real forecast....because there would have been ZERO data to support such a conclusion.
It's not as if a linear extrapolation of a weather chart is unreasonable. It may be wrong, but it's within the realm of possibilities.
(I don't wish harm to anyone, but it's ironic that after the ex-Canadian PM wished for it to hit Mar-a-Lago, it turned right at Mar-a-Lago and headed for Canada.)