Klotzbach and Gray continue to expect a well above-average hurricane season

Isn’t one of he more succesful indicators for Atlantic hurricane prediction 6 months out use dust levels in the subSaharen Sahel region? I thought I remembered reading about something like that.

I’m predicting 1 hurricane in the Atlantic.
If get 5, I’ll contact the media and report we got 5 times as many hurricanes as expected. The end is near!

I am personally getting sick and tired of the snide comments written so far and some before, the scoffs at probability forecasting for tropical cyclones.
Dr. Gray has made a career of being quite successful in forecasting the seasons.
The eastern seaboard states (and this does not include the gulf coast states) of the USA contain 112 MILLION people, most of them in rather close proximity to the coast.
Put another way, even though the Eastern Seaboard is only 11.8% percent of the area of the United States…it contains 37% of its total population.
The largest mega-region in the USA, some 50 million people, includes New York City, one of the largest cities in the world, and one that could be quite vulnerable to the (indeed if rare) direct hit from a tropical cyclone.
And I will not even begin to start talking about very densely populated South Florida…
True, tropical cyclones don’t usually bring the instantaneous and apocalyptic destruction that say, tsunamis do (on a large scale) or that of an EF5 tornado (on a small scale.)
But they can be extremely disruptive to commerce, destructive to infrastructure and property, not to mention a major, major threat to life and safety.
In light of the fact that these beasts are the largest storms on earth…and have been responsible for catastrophically huge losses to life and property across the globe…
…I am mystified why some individuals on here, cowardly hiding behind their little computer keyboards in their climate-controlled rooms and insulated from Nature’s dangers, would make light of hurricane forecasting, with cheap, uncalled-for, below-the-belt, class A bull****.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

crosspatch says:
June 2, 2011 at 8:21 pm
My guess is we will have an active season. We have tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures at or slightly below normal but we have air aloft that is much colder than normal. This will make for much more vigorous convection. What powers these storms is a difference in temperature. The greater the difference, the more powerful the storm. You can have warmer water or you can have colder air, as long as that difference in temperature is there, you will have powerful convection.
Air temperatures above 25,000 feet are the coldest we have recorded since they have been measured by satellites. Warm, wet air will rise quickly in that cold air resulting it a stronger updraft which should get things spinning nicely.
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These are very, very good observations….and in line with Dr. Spencer’s remarks on his website as to the most violent tornadic cyclones being a product of so much cold air aloft.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

Mods one of my comments may have gone to spam because I typed in my screen name wrong.
Sorry about the trouble of rescuing. I will pay more attention next time.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA

svaethesharks says:
June 2, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Chris,
It doesn’t appear to me that anyone is diminishing the potential danger of these storms on land or sea. The issue is the integrity of the forecasts. Unfortunately there is an impression that these forecasts are announced intentionally at the high end in probabilities for the forecaster’s own reasons, rather than striving for likely, probable occurrences. Its not as if individual local areas are forecasted to be targeted. Instead everyone is put on the edge of fear. Maybe that’s good so people will be prepared if something happens. But how many times can one credibly say the sky is falling if it isn’t. At this point everyone is watching. Casting the weather is dicey. We’ll see.
Perhaps, in the end, we are all deceived by weather. If the Norse had accurate future forecasts (akin to our great climate models), perhaps Greenland would never have been settled.

“”Ric Werme says:
June 2, 2011 at 9:26 pm
– – –
Dust both shades the ocean, slowing down SST warming, and warms the air around the dust, resulting in a more stable atmosphere suppressing the convection vital to a tropical storm.“”
My bold. Is this not what happens in a warming world? Would the good Dr Gray be basing his forecast on a cooling world?

Of course it does not really matter, all these warmists want is death and destruction by weather. That instantly becomes climate in the minds of these charlatans. One bad hurricane is all they pray for.

“if the high is to the East, storms will go into the Gulf. If it is to the West, the Atlantic seaboard is at risk.”
That logic is backwards. High to the East means Atlantic seaboard and vice versa. Sorry.

I don’t care about their forecast, but how do their past forecasts stack up against reality?
Rather like our UK Met. Office and their forecast of a bar-b-cue summer, which was a wash out, and last winter was to be mild but turned out to be the coldest for many years, I have taken all meteorological forecasts for longer than 3 days with a very large pinch of salt.

After well over 30 years of ‘man-made’ global warming we have this:

Climate control of the global tropical storm days (1965–2008)
Wang et al.
The tropical storm days have a consistent global record over the past 44 years (1965–2008), which provides an alternative metric for integrated information about genesis, track, and lifespan………………..However, the global total number of storm days shows no trend and only an unexpected large amplitude fluctuation driven by El Niño-Southern Oscillation and PDO. The rising temperature of about 0.5°C in the tropics so far has not yet affected the global tropical storm days.

Al Gore and the other igNobel prize winners should now step up to the plate and tell us what global warming is supposed to do to hurricanes?

C. DISCUSSION
In a global warming or global cooling world, the atmosphere’s upper air temperatures
will warm or cool in unison with the SSTs. Vertical lapse rates will not be significantly
altered. We have no plausible physical reasons for believing that Atlantic hurricane
frequency or intensity will change significantly if global ocean temperatures were to
continue to rise. For instance, in the quarter-century period from 1945-1969 when the
globe was undergoing a weak cooling trend, the Atlantic basin experienced 80 major (Cat
3-4-5) hurricanes and 201 major hurricane days. By contrast, in a similar 25-year period
from 1970-1994 when the globe was undergoing a general warming trend, there were
only 38 Atlantic major hurricanes (48% as many) and 63 major hurricane days (31% as
many) (Figure 26). Atlantic SSTs and hurricane activity do not follow global mean
temperature trends.
http://hurricane.atmos.colostate.edu/Forecasts/2011/june2011/jun2011.pdf