Monday, November 20, 2006

The 2006 Hurricane Season

Remember the August 8 Update? Don't you maybe think we should have had one since?
1. Expected Activity - 75% chance above normal, 20% chance near normal, 5% chance below normal
Now, things with a 5 % chance do happen, roughly one in every twenty times. But, shouldn't we have expected some Bayesian updating? They told us "For the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, the expected ACE range is 110%-170% of the median... A value of 117% of the median corresponds to the lower boundary for an above-normal season." So, we expected above normal to way, way above normal.

This concerns me, because I can't shake the feeling that there are a bunch of potential hurricanes still out there, and that the tropical ocean has to relieve itself. Also, last hurricane season went into January, and this year's much warmer, at least in Manhattan. Generalizing about the rest of the world from what's happening in Manhattan is a core value of American writing, so it can't be wrong. So, I think that maybe the whole seasonal evolution thing is badly skewed enough that hurricane season is still kind of stuck in the middle.

I'm a little worried that January 2007 will be like September, with one tropical depression after another growing to hurricane status, half of them major. It's really important that hurricane season end by mid-February, because I'm going sailing in the Virgin Islands.

All I'm saying is, it'd be nice to have a new update from the NHC.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you need to buy into one of those hedge funds, so that if the hurricane season does swamp your VI vacation, you can at least score big on the market.