Post by Dr. Ryan N. Maue
The National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative “think-tank”, has again issued a press release asking if NOAA is Smarter than Fifth Graders (?) when forecasting the number of Atlantic tropical storms in 2011. However, in their lame satirical attempt at making serious points, they reveal how little they actually know about seasonal hurricane forecasting. Amy Ridenour, president of the outfit, falsely conflates seasonal hurricane forecasting with climate science methods relating human-caused global warming to changes in x, y, and z phenomena.
Ridenour and her Think-Tank should not mock the researchers who are legitimately trying to determine the ferocity of the upcoming hurricane season – as preparedness is the key to preventing loss of life. NOAA, including the National Weather Service and the many labs around the US including the Storm Prediction Center and National Hurricane Center perform admirably to warn the public of impending situations, and often explain the causes and implications of weather phenomena in professional manners.
If you read the NOAA Hurricane Outlook for 2011, you will find the scientific reasoning for the upcoming “above-normal” hurricane season. However, predicting the exact number of storms is indeed a crap-shoot, as many tropical cyclones develop from small-scale, seemingly opportunistic disturbances that are not necessarily characteristic of the prevailing large-scale climate. Looking to the tropical Pacific for the current and upcoming El Nino Southern Oscillation phase is well-established in the scientific literature to be a statistically significant and useful predictor of Atlantic and Pacific seasonal tropical storm activity.
“Washington, D.C. – The same organization that challenged NOAA to bragging rights for the best hurricane forecast last year using a trained chimp armed only with a pair of dice and a craps table is challenging the agency again: This time by putting two fifth graders up against the multi-billion dollar federal agency.
“Forecasts are just that: forecasts. All that matters is what actually happens,” said Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research. “We should keep this in mind as we consider whether to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Past forecasts of rising temperatures, sea levels, and droughts and other extreme weather events due to rising concentrations of carbon haven’t proven any more reliable that NOAA’s annual hurricane forecast. Until their reliability improves, it would be irresponsible to base policy on them.“
I ask Ridenour to retract her conclusions based upon her false logic, and issue an apology to the specific forecasters at NOAA, who are not invested in global warming prognostications, but legitimate public service in providing expert assessments of hurricane risk in 2011.
Instead ask this question: how much money has been spent on seasonal hurricane forecasting research instead of climate change modeling scenarios for the year 2100? If you are going to mock someone, then make sure you have the right target.
Theo Goodwin says:
May 27, 2011 at 1:14 pm
I just thought I’d go back and look at your contributions to this thread. How much do you know about hurricane (i.e. Atlantic) forecasting?
When you say extrapolation, are you including searching for analog years? That’s something many forecasters do, and do so by looking at particular areas, e.g. ENSO state and east Atlantic SSTs. These analogs provide an important early look at what a season may hold. ENSO predictions aren’t very good yet, so we can get surprised by an El Nino forming mid-season or by Saharan dust fouling up the atmospheric temperature profile.
My personal thoughts on the upcoming season is that we’ll have a double dip La Nina and that the greening of the Sahara and weak solar input will mean little Saharan dust. Hence, an active season. That’s not science – I’ve measured nothing, I can’t attach numbers to anything. But hey, neither can the chimp. Joe Bastardi, by looking at analogs, thinks New England has a better chance of a strike than in recent years. He can put numbers on the warm south and cool north that match his analogs. The cool New England spring is different than his analogs. Take him (and his well studied biases) more seriously than me.
I am down on NOAA’s smug CAGW bias but I’m okay with forecasts with a short term. These forecasters let it hang out there to be right or wrong. There is no readjusting the goal posts as is unabashedly practiced by CAGW folks. A wrong forecast may lead to an autopsy that spots a confounding factor and leads to improvements in future forecasts. They seem to have the equatorial and G of Mex SSTs identified as factors and the status of ENSO. There is obviously something more and maybe they will spot something – the best chance to do so is when you are wrong.
Both Dr Maue and many of his critics are overreacting.
Theo Goodwin says:
May 27, 2011 at 2:24 pm
NOAA’s hurricane predictions are indeed based on physical hypotheses — the hypothesis being that hurricane activity is determined, in part, by SSTs, the states of ocean currents, and prevailing wind patterns, which in turn determine how much energy is available for potential hurricanes. That hypothesis is probably not the complete explanation for hurricanes, and as a result predictions based on them will not be very precise or even terribly reliable. But that only indicates that the science is immature, not that it is “not science.” Moreover, the demand the NOAA be able to predict the origins and paths of hurricanes before they have formed is unreasonable. Weather is complex adaptive system, semi-chaotic, and the behavior of such systems is impossible to predict (in detail) in principle, except in the very short term. It will never be possible to predict a particular August storm, its strength and path, in April. So give the NOAA hurricane guys a break; let them try to work out the mechanisms more completely.
On the other hand, Dr Maue writes,
Dr Maue needs to freshen up his sense of humor. There is no “false logic” in Ridenour’s spoof; she is pointing out that NOAA’s hurricane forecasts have a poor track record, as do most of the predictions of the AGW zealots, some of whom dwell within that same agency. She does not accuse the hurricane forecasters of AGW alarmism.
Probably what NOAA should do is keep its hurricane forecasts “in house” until it can narrow the error bars and improve its predictive accuracy. At present its forecasts are next to worthless and thus are bound to draw ridicule.
Ric Werme says:
May 28, 2011 at 10:31 pm
Theo Goodwin says:
May 27, 2011 at 1:14 pm
Will you be self-critical? Will you swear never to use the word ‘prediction’ unless you have some physical hypotheses which can explain the phenomenon that you claim to predict?
That would mean that no one in climate science can use the word. Will you agree that neither NOAA nor anyone else can do better than look at old charts and graphs and extrapolate from them? Notice that extrapolation does not fall into the realm of science.
“When you say extrapolation, are you including searching for analog years? That’s something many forecasters do, and do so by looking at particular areas, e.g. ENSO state and east Atlantic SSTs.”
Thanks for your valuable contributions. I wished you had chimed in earlier. All that meteorologists or NOAA folks can do is look at their information on earlier years and hope to find similarities to what seems to be developing in the present. Some folks did this nicely this year when they saw the conditions of 1974 emerging again this year, and their warnings about tornadoes in the US were helpful. However, such comparisons involve reasoning by analogy only, namely, that 1974 “is similar to” what is emerging now. They have no definition of “is similar to” that can be expressed in scientific terms; that is, none that can be expressed as physical hypotheses that have explanatory and predictive power. I do not want to throw NOAA out with the bath water. But if we (of all people, we) permit them to call this science then we are enabling every Al Gore who comes along. What NOAA has is very interesting and somewhat useful pre-science. To call it anything else is to act irresponsibly toward all non-scientists who might read or hear our words.