Here’s the last NOAA release on hurricane season: NOAA Expects Busy Atlantic Hurricane Season from May 27, 2010. Now an update is coming. Still busy? We’ll see.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Susan Buchanan 301-713-0622 August 2, 2010
MEDIA ADVISORY
NOAA to Issue Updated Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook
NOAA will update the Atlantic hurricane season outlook this Thursday and provide the latest information on the climate factors behind the outlook, including the role of ENSO (La Niña/El Niño) in the tropical eastern Pacific. This scheduled update coincides with the approaching historical peak of the hurricane season.
What: Media teleconference announcing the updated Atlantic hurricane season outlook.
When: Thursday, August 5; 11am ET
Who: Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center
How: To obtain the number and passcode for the teleconference, please send an e-mail to susan.buchanan@noaa.gov or call 301-713-0622
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Maybe they can entice Paul the octopus out of retirement to give them a hand on their predictions.
Colorado State’s Klotzbach and Gray’s next update will be Aug 4. Normally NOAA tries to beat them to the punch by a couple days. Perhaps this time they’re trying to get people to focus on their forecast and forget about CSU.
I think the next update will be in December and be a combined retrospective and first look at 2011. Ah – as I thought, they also have a series of two-week forecasts to cover the serious part of the hurricane season, see http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Includes/Documents/Two_Week_Forecasts.html
It will be interesting to see what they say about water temps. I think Saharan dust may have blown through absorbing sunlight in the atmosphere and reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ocean surface. Joe D’Aleo had some comments about that in his July lull post.
BTW, I don’t see these updates (or solar activity changes) and unfair do-overs. I fully expect that the weather forecast for this Friday will change twice a day up to Friday. Hurricane-wise, ENSO developments and dust are hard to forecast, so I expect the forecast will change during the season.
Note for Theo Goodwin: Chill! CSU has an archive of past forecasts. If you want to compare them versus what happened, please do. Klotzbach/Gray do that themselves, so your effort might be a waste of time, or it might make for an interesting counter point. I don’t understand why you’re getting so upset over that. Is it hard to find old NOAA forecasts? They’re never as detailed as the CSU forecasts, so I generally skim the NOAA forecasts, but read the CSU forecasts.
After carefully re-examining the data with improved science and modeling techniques, the NHC predicts there will be not nearly as many hurricanes in July 2010 and the first 5 days of August 2010 as we previously thought. The total number of hurricanes in 2010 may also be smaller. If anyone sees an Atlantic hurricane, please call us.
This proves, of course, that Anthropogenic Global Warming is real and serious.
Sonicfrog says:
August 2, 2010 at 1:10 pm
In the meantime, the wonderful EPA is going to pass new rules regulating…. Dust!
Hey, California is once again at the forefront of trends. How do you like us now America??????
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Thanks for the alert. I am passing it on to the farmer sites. Between Premises ID, Livestock tracing, the bogus and draconian”Food Safety” bills not to mention Cap and trade I really think the government is deliberately killing the country.
This comes from the Ag Journal, Billings, Montana: “At a recent ceremony at the White House, Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore let slip what many have long believed was his real intention as regards to U.S. agriculture.
“While presenting a national award to a Colorado FFA member, Gore asked the student what his/her life plans were. Upon hearing that the FFA member wanted to continue on in production agriculture, Gore reportedly replied that the young person should develop other plans because our production agriculture is being shifted out of the U.S. to the Third World.”
I think that sums up the plans the of the current government too. Our livelihoods are deliberately “being shifted out of the U.S. to the Third World.”
“My name shall be carved in stone alongside the great traitors: Lucifer, Judas, and Arnold.” – Benedict Arnold
Can we expect to see NOAA admit its utter failure to predict with any degree of accuracy? Will NOAA issue a fulsome apology and revise its narrative? This organisation has access to lavish funding and state of the art facilities and although mistakes will be made in any prediction the sheer scale of the errors can only mean they are sticking to a script rather than finding the truth.
This is indicative of climate science in general, while they stick to a narrative without regard to actual reality and while they stick doggedly to their wildly inaccurate models then climate science will quickly degenerate into nothing more than a cult.
I see a stubborn refusal to face up to and address facts and information that contradict their core beliefs and whilst group think prejudice is understandable in a church it is unforgivable in a scientific institution in receipt of public funding.
mike sphar says:
August 2, 2010 at 3:14 pm
The rest of this hurricane season will be dominated by the Cape Verde storms as normal. There are 120 days left in this season. Waves off of Africa trigger the Cape Verde storms. These waves come off that continent at about one every 3.5 days. Therefore there will be less than 35 more waves during the season. Of these about 10 to 15% develop into storms, so we will see about 5 or 6 more Cape Verde storms. A bunch of forecasters will be wiping egg off their collective faces soon.
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So it looks like you think the chimp will win then.
Think-Tank Says Trained Chimp Can Predict Hurricanes Better Than NOAA… And Puts it to the Test: Posted on May 18, 2010 by Anthony Watts
Chimp Predicts 6-8 Atlantic Hurricanes in 2010
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/think-tank-says-trained-chimp-can-predict-hurricanes-better-than-noaa%e2%80%a6-and-puts-it-to-the-test/
This just a sort of commentary. Hurricanes, while destructive to human and avian habitation, are really necessary for the distribution of rainfall into the interiors of Asia, North America, India, and South America. This is not a trivial thing. Without hurricanes, there would be no agriculture possible in the interior of these land masses. I often make light of the stupidity of the neo-environmentalists and the Warmists. But I now worry that they may be deranged or seriously outside the scope of general science or ecology.
NOAA will update the Atlantic hurricane season outlook this Thursday and provide the latest information on the climate factors behind the outlook, including the role of ENSO (La Niña/El Niño) in the tropical eastern Pacific.
NOAA is already setting the stage. If their predictions fall flat in the Atlantic, they’ll just pull some examples from the Pacific and claim they got the numbers right, but were only off in their locations…
Ric Werme says:
August 2, 2010 at 7:39 pm
“…It will be interesting to see what they say about water temps. I think Saharan dust may have blown through absorbing sunlight in the atmosphere and reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the ocean surface. Joe D’Aleo had some comments about that in his July lull post…”
The connection to Saharan Air Layer (SAL) is interesting, Ric, and I dug up a bit of info on the links below. It seems it also fertilises plankton blooms and well as suppressing hurricane formation…
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0801-dust_storms_and_hurricanes.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100706103414.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080206192436.htm
Pingo says:
August 2, 2010 at 1:01 pm
We in the uk could do with some of your hurricanes starting.. We get the soggy remnants and they’ve already started on their ridiculous drought talk.
Speak for yourself Pingo, Scotland has had another wet summer, rainfall in July was twice the normal average. Send me some empty bottles 😉
if it turns out to be busier, buy more plywood …
if it turns out to be less busy, I hope NOAA pays proper respect to Dr. James Hansimian, whose forecasting methods predicted less from the beginning …
Reading their June and July reports, NOAA are claiming an ACE of “111% of the long term mean” and by counting Alex in both June and July they can claim that both months are above “normal” (Cat 2 hurricanes only occur once every five years in June and two TS/H is above normal in July).
At the same time, I have some sympathy with them as I think there is a lot of pressure to over-emphasize in order to make sure people are prepared. I remember (very) well a big storm in the UK in 1987 where the UK met office told people not to worry as it was going to pass over France and they got a lot of stick (when it hit Brighton and went on up through London) for not giving people any warning. I am sure this has coloured their forecasts since then.
I seem to see this a lot in local extreme weather alerts in the US and Canada – the forecasters will always err on the side of caution and give a worst case scenario so that people will take precautions. Maybe Anthony and/or other professional forecasters can weigh in on this – is there a “cover your a**” feeling to provide worst cases so that people are not taken by surprise? What is worse – a worst case scenario that doesn’t occur or a best estimate if significantly worse conditions develop later?
Not trying to let plainly OTT CAGW predictions off the hook, but a bit of consideration for the pressures on forecasters is called for I think.
The chip predicted 6-8 hurricanes vs. NOAA prediction of 8-14. Since we are on track for 2 or 3, looks like the chipm will be closest (although not very close at all)
“…the science is settled”
I’m going to buck against the consensus and predict that NOAA will on Thursday continue to predict a fairly high level of storms. After all, the Atlantic is still warmer than normal, and La Nina developing is supposed to reduce the interference from that side.
And let’s face it, the CO2 brigade has had such bad luck recently (I’m not going to get into heat waves versus cold waves across Eurasia) that they are probably due some “good luck”. So I predict a whopper to penetrate into Texas this year.
The only thing against this might be the low sunspot count. Has anyone got a correlation value for hurricanes against sunspots? Even if they have, I doubt that NOAA use it – the Sun isn’t allowed to interfere with climate.
Rich.
I don’t think NOAA’s original forecast had anything to do with global warming. Meteorology justified their original forecast. Most meteorologists I know at easternuswx.com were also predcting in the range of 15-24 named storms. Many if not most of these meteorologists are self-described skeptics of mainstream AGW. The two most important factors in the forecast were
1. the warmest atlantic sea surface temperatures ever (warmer than 2005 which was the 2nd warmest, and coincidentally most active season in recorded history) . The warm SSTs are universally recognized to be due principally to the AMO – not AGW.
2. A developing La Nina which produces favorable wind patterns for development.
Both of these variables reamin essentially the same, although I have heard speculation that the La Nina may be developing too quickly for ideal storm formation conditions.
Thus I expect their forecast to remain essentially the same, perhaps decreased by 1 or 2 named storms, since we are off the pace by 1 storm so far (You would probably expect about 4 storms before August 3rd if you were on pace for 18, we have had 3).
Andrew,
Thanks, well that makes a consensus of two of us :-). Re the record Atlantic temperatures, there must be a case for saying that it would be a combination of AMO (to make them high) and GW (perhaps A) to make them highest.
Rich.
Yep agree Rich.. GW/AGW would have some role in the warmth but the extreme warmth of +1-2.5C across most of the basin is mostly just due to temporary weather patterns from this winter through early summer. Anyways, the forecast reasoning shouldn’t have changed too much so I doubt the forecast will change more than a storm or two. And I’d be surprised if we didn’t end up with at least a dozen named storms this year.