hurricanes
cmooney | July 5, 2006Apart from Tropical Storm Alberto, the 2006 North Atlantic hurricane season has been pretty slow so far. That's not unexpected; June is never exactly a rockin' month for hurricanes, although last year, July was a rockin' month. So far it's not clear what to expect; I find the best source of day-to-day information on what's happening in the tropics is Jeff Masters' WunderBlog, which I encourage you to check out.
Meanwhile, despite the season's relatively slow start, one of the leading forecasting groups, Professors Mark Saunders and Adam Lea's Tropical Storm Risk, continues to predict an…
cmooney | June 12, 2006The line of demarcation between a tropical storm and a hurricane is, obviously, somewhat arbitrary in nature. Why should the official cutoff point be sustained winds of 74 miles per hour, rather than 73 mph or 75 mph? Defined in terms of their true meteorological species, all three storms are tropical cyclones--period.
From a psychological point of view, however, the question of whether Florida gets hit by a "hurricane" this early in the season, as opposed to a mere "tropical storm," obviously makes a lot of difference. So that's what everyone is going to be watching for. The latest advisory…
cmooney | June 12, 2006As I was traveling through various airports yesterday, I couldn't help hearing about Tropical Depression, and then Tropical Storm, and now what may possibly become Hurricane Alberto. Or not. We just don't know yet, but a reading of the National Hurricane Center's archived discussions of the storm shows that so far, it has surprised forecasters and intensified when they didn't expect it to do so. And as forecaster Pasch put it at 11 AM EDT today:
GIVEN THE UNCERTAINTIES IN PREDICTING INTENSITY CHANGE WE MUST NOW ALLOW FOR THE DISTINCT POSSIBILITY THAT ALBERTO COULD BECOME A HURRICANE.
This…
cmooney | June 1, 2006Check out Jeff Masters, especially this entry here, where he explains why we are not going to see any early season storms this year (too much wind shear). I'm adding him to the blogroll.
cmooney | March 15, 2006The prognostications are starting to roll in for the upcoming hurricane season, which officially begins June 1 (although really, and as we saw last year, the start and end dates are a bit arbitrary). So far, there's not a lot of optimism. According to reporting by the St. Petersburg Times: "Sea surface temperatures are above average, La Nina has returned and the Atlantic Basin remains in an 'up' cycle for storms." An El Nino in the Pacific tends to suppress hurricanes in the Atlantic, but with La Nina it's the opposite. Anyway, it's still early--but it doesn't sound like there's much to be…