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The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season ended Saturday, and — unless a new sponsor pops up with wads of cash — so did Colorado State University’s hurricane forecasting team. Fine with us. We won’t miss either one. The Colorado team, officially the Tropical Meteorology Project, has been issuing forecasts for the upcoming hurricane season each summer for 30 years. At the beginning of this year’s season, the team predicted 18 named storms. Nine of those, it said, would become hurricanes. Four would be major hurricanes. Here’s how it shook out: There were 13 named storms. Only two became hurricanes. Neither was...

Live 7-day National Weather Forecast for "Uptown" Charlotte.

This year’s American Political Science Association conference was set to be in New Orleans this weekend. Suffice it to say, that didn’t happen. It’s a shame, not least because one of the panels was going to highlight five new studies on how to forecast American presidential and congressional elections, all of which are highly relevant to 2012. But just because those studies’ authors didn’t get the chance to present their work in person doesn’t mean we can’t take a look at it here, at least at the four papers we’ve obtained from the authors (the author of the fifth is...

Now that you have read the results of the various economic forecasting models that have served so many so badly in recent years—they are predicting the U.S. economy will grow in 2012 at an annual rate of between 1.5 percent and 2 percent—let me offer an alternative way of looking at things. It is called ‘pick your if.’ If you believe that the recent decision of the European Central Bank to make unlimited cash available to eurozone banks for the next three years, and that the meeting next week of German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicholas Sarkozy will...

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla (Reuters) – Above-average temperatures were hitting across the southern United States on Tuesday, with drought-parched west Texas and north Florida bearing the brunt of the heat. A high of 110 degrees is forecast for Midland, Texas on Tuesday, shattering the city's daily record of 105 degrees set in 1945, said Victor Murphy, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Fort Worth. Florida's capital city of Tallahassee is expected to reach 102 degrees, breaking the previous record of 99 degrees, Murphy said. Southern parts of Georgia and Alabama will also top the century mark. The average temperature this time...

Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen IN 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson had spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a...

...Citing weak real estate markets and high unemployment, the IMF cut its forecast for U.S. economic growth to 2.8% this year, down from the 3% rate it predicted just three months ago. The IMF also lowered forecasts for the United Kingdom and Japan...

The Atlantic hurricane season is expected to produce above-average activity, a closely watched forecast issued by Colorado State University said.

A report by the University of the Pacific’s Business Forecasting Center says that California can expect to see little change in the economic climate for the next three years. The Stockton, California based university’s forecast, released this week, concentrates on Northern and Central California, though it projects a statewide unemployment rate above 10 percent for the next three years. Currently at 12.4 percent, the rate is not expected to dip below double digits until 2014, when the school sees the number at 9.6, currently the national average. California has lost approximately 1.3 million jobs since the summer of 2007, when...

Another year of sluggish growth. And another one after that. And so on. Full recovery? Wait until 2016. The economic forecast released Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown is as grim as the budget blueprint he delivered at the same time. It says a troubled housing market will continue to hold back consumer spending in California for the foreseeable future. "A sharp rebound does not appear likely," says the official forecast from the state Department of Finance. Perhaps the most striking prediction: California's job market won't recapture all its lost jobs until the third quarter of 2016, or a whopping 87...

In October the forecaster privately warned the Government - with whom it has a contract - that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter. It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts. The Met Office eventually issued a public warning about the early onset of winter a month later, just days before snow and ice covered much of Britain and temperatures plummeted to the lowest on record. Motoring organisations and passenger groups said yesterday that the delay hampered preparations for winter. It has also been disclosed that the BBC...

Forecasting prices for anything can be tricky. And a precious-metal commodity such as silver is no exception. With gold holding the leash on its “lapdog” – silver – the performance of the so-called “yellow metal” holds the key to silver prices in the New Year. Here’s why: For several years leading up to the 2008 stock-market panic, it typically took 55 ounces of silver to buy an ounce of gold. Today, a gold ounce will cost you 50 ounces of silver. The message: There’s been a fundamental shift, where precious metals investors see silver as the “more-affordable” true-money option. So,...

The Federal Reserve slashed its outlook for the U.S. economy for this year and 2011 and projected that it could take several years for the economy to return to health. According to minutes from the Fed's November 3 meeting released Tuesday, more than half of the central bank's policymakers thought it would take about five or six years for unemployment, growth and inflation to return to more normal levels. Other Fed members warned the full recovery could take even longer than that. The much weaker forecast is the major reason that policymakers decided earlier this month to announce a plan...

There's a long-held belief in political circles that the weather affects voter turnout on Election Day - and that rainy, snowy or otherwise bad weather spells trouble for Democratic candidates and helps Republicans. With so many close races across the country, you can bet that pundits on both sides of the aisle will be closely watching the weather reports. One 2007 study (http://myweb.fsu.edu/bgomez/GomezHansfordKrause_JOP_2007.pdf) published in the Journal of Politics did find that stormy weather on Election Day keeps some voters at home - for every inch of rain that falls, voter participation declines by about 1 percent. And bad weather...

Projected U.S. economic growth for the rest of this year and next was revised down for a third month in a row by a panel of about 50 economists. The latest Blue Chip Economic Indicators report on Thursday said the weaker outlook for second-half 2010 growth stemmed from lower expectations for consumer spending, business investment and private construction. "Growth in the current quarter now is expected to be little better than the disappointingly soft advance registered last quarter," the survey said. Gross domestic product grew at a meager 1.6 percent annual rate in the second quarter, less than half the...

As is customary for me, I try to provide an initial winter weather outlook around the first of September, just as we begin to think Fall. Why? It comes from my work experience in the private weather industry where critical planning for the upcoming winter takes place during September and October and that is when the winter outlook is so important. This includes the utility industry with regards to their planning on the amount of natural gas and heating oil will be required to heat our homes to local municipalities, state departments of transportation and the local snow plow operator...

Last year at this time when I was putting together the fall and preliminary winter outlooks I was seeing an El Nino amidst a cold PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) facing me. That helped to lead to a very chilly winter for much of the eastern U.S. and especially the Southeast. This year the pendulum is swinging in the opposite direction and that means a La Nina amidst a cold PDO. So can we expect opposite conditions for this fall/winter?

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) – The threat of an above-average 2010 Atlantic hurricane season has increased over the last month and it now promises to be "very active," two leading U.S. forecasters said on Wednesday. William Gray and Phil Klozbach, who head the respected Colorado State University hurricane forecast team, said they would ramp up their prediction for the 2010 season in a report due out on June 2.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama has underestimated the government budget deficit for the next decade by 1.2 trillions dollars, estimates by Congress showed Friday. Under Obama's latest budget projections, the cumulative deficit over the 2011-2020 period would be 8.532 trillion dollars, or 4.5 percent of gross domestic product, the nation's economic output. But the Congressional Budget Office estimated Friday the deficit would snowball to 9.761 trillion dollars or 5.2 percent of GDP. The CBO expects a deficit "1.2 trillion dollars greater over the 2011-2020 period than what the administration anticipates under the president?s budget," CBO director Douglas Elmendorf...

One of his top trends: Neo-survivalism Quote: In 2010, survivalism will go mainstream. Unemployed or fearing it, foreclosed or nearing it, pensions lost and savings gone, all sorts of folk who once believed in the system have lost their faith. Motivated not by worst-case scenario fears but by do-or-die necessity, the new non-believers, unwilling to go under or live on the streets, will devise ingenious stratagems to beat the system, get off the grid (as much as possible), and stay under the radar......