Here’s a prediction about the upcoming hurricane from what, I believe, may be the most reliable sources to yet predict the weather.
New Orleans, still down and out from last year’s assault by Hurricane
Katrina, is the U.S. city most likely to be struck by hurricane force
winds during the 2006 storm season, a researcher said on Wednesday.
When I say “most reliable” I really mean “least credentialed”. Here are our two Carnacs.
Chuck Watson of Kinetic Analysis Corp., Savannah, Georgia a risk assessment firm
and
University of Central Florida statistics professor Mark Johnson
You know, I’m sure these are two genuinely nice guys. Seriously, nothing against them at all. But how do a statistics professor and a risk assement firm come up with their numbers? Base it on history.
The forecasters, who have worked with the oil and gas industry and with
state insurance regulators, base their forecast in part on the paths of
storms over the past 155 years and expected global climate conditions
this year.
I will give them one thing. History can show trends in these things. Joe Bastardi at AccuWeather is always using analogs against past hurricane seasons to find what might happen during the current season. The part that kills me though is the “expected global climate conditions”. Forecasters can’t even get the forecast for the next week right, and we’re supposed to believe this for the entire hurricane season? OK.
Also, Reuters has to throw in their little jabs about global warming and how nobody predicted what happened last year.
No leading forecasters came close to predicting what happened in 2005, when 28 tropical storms spawned a record 15 hurricanes.
But for now, he considers the 2005 season an aberration rather than a trend or a definitive sign of effects from global warming.“If
it happens again this year or next year, then we’re in a different
climate world than we were in the last 100 years or so,” Watson said.
The final nail in this is the last paragraph of the story.
Watson and Johnson have published a number of research papers on storm and wind damage modeling.
There you have it. They have done research on what happens after the storm, so they are qualified to predict the future.
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