Charles Fenwick at Eye of the Storm has a post about a new NOAA map that analyzes the percentage probability of tropical development, at any given time, in 4,000-square-mile blocks of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific basins. Pretty cool. Currently, the greatest threat area is due south of the Manzanillo area in Mexico, where The Storm Track says Tropical Depression 2E might soon form.

Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle looks at hurricane forecasting: where it’s improved, and where it still struggles. Specifically, the article attempts to explain why it’s so much more difficult to predict a hurricane’s intensity than its track:

Track forecasting is relatively easy, [National Hurricane Center forecaster James] Franklin said, because large atmospheric features — such as the semi-permanent Bermuda High — steer hurricanes. Satellites and other tools can measure these features, and computers can adequately model them.

“The physics is pretty straightforward,” Franklin said. “Hurricanes will move where the tropical fronts push them.”

Better measurement of these features and refined computer models should continue to improve storms’ project paths.

Not so with a hurricane’s strength, which is controlled by many factors, not all of them well understood. Scientists simply don’t fully understand how thunderstorms coalesce into a tropical storm and form an eyewall within a hurricane.

There are more difficulties. Once a storm forms, forecasters aren’t looking at features hundreds or thousands of miles across, like the Bermuda High, but at things like rainbands tens of miles across. These can’t easily be measured by satellites. Numerous, mostly unanswered questions abound: is the air humid or dry? Is dry air getting sucked into the storm’s core? How quickly is the ocean transferring its heat into the atmosphere?

Answering such questions is essential for understanding if a hurricane will strengthen or weaken appreciably.

My major beef with the article is that it doesn’t even mention the term “eyewall replacement cycle.” The total unpredictability of those cycles is a huge part of the reason why, in particular, it is almost impossible to accurately predict the intensity fluctuations of major hurricanes. Anyway, according to the article, “forecasters say it will probably take another decade before they can reliably predict how a fickle hurricane’s intensity will change over time.”

In other news, yesterday’s opening day of hurricane season was also, appropriately/ironically enough, the first day of Ray Nagin’s second term as mayor of New Oreleans. The mayor who fiddled while his city drowned told his fellow residents to “get off your duffs,” an expression that would have been an excellent piece of advice for his office in the days before Katrina hit. But I digress…

Thursday’s big piece of Katrina-related news was actually this:

A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.

“This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, ‘We’ve had a catastrophic failure,’” Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season.

The Corps said it will use the lessons it has learned to build better flood defenses. …

The Corps, Strock said, has undergone a period of intense introspection and is “deeply saddened and enormously troubled by the suffering of so many.” …

The much-anticipated report - prepared by the 150-member Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force, assembled and headed by the Corps - is intended to serve as a road map for engineers as they seek to design and build better levees and floodwalls.

Serious work began on New Orleans’ hurricane protection system in the 1960s after Hurricane Betsy flooded the city in 1965. But over the decades, funding slackened and many parts of the system were not finished by the time Katrina hit.

The result was a disjointed system of levees, inconsistent in quality, materials and design, that left gaps exploited by the storm, the report said.
Also, engineers did not take into account the poor soil quality underneath New Orleans, the report said, and failed to account for the sinking of land, which caused some sections to be as much as 2 feet lower than other parts.

Four breaches in canals that run through New Orleans were caused by foundation failures that were “not considered in the original design of these structures,” the report said. Those breaches caused two-thirds of the city’s flooding.

(Hat tip: WXNation.)

Also from WXNation, a defense of Max Mayfield:

As you may have seen on Drudge, some environmentalists are protesting today, calling for the heads of National Hurricane Center director Max Mayfield and other NOAA officials. Their claim? That federal hurricane scientists are covering up a link between climate change and hurricanes.

I’ve previously stated my thoughts on this topic here, but let me say that I believe people looking for a conspiracy here are misguided.

Based upon my discussions with hurricane researchers — some of which have been at length — there is no general consensus on this question. Yes, more and stronger hurricanes tend to form when sea surface temperatures are warmer, but there are many more ingredients that go into a powerful hurricane, not all of which would be strengthened by a warmer Earth.

Even Kerry Emanuel, probably the most prominent advocate of a link between climate change and hurricanes, has acknowledged no scientific consensus has emerged on this issue. (He believes, however, that one will in a couple of years as forecasters like Mayfield become more comfortable with the science.)

But the bottom line is that the science on this subject simply isn’t settled yet. The hurricane record is poor for all but the last 30 years, and only then is it truly reliable in the Atlantic basin, where only about 10 percent of the world’s storms form. Moreover, scientists can’t even describe the physics of a strengthening hurricane with confidence.

The denigration of Mayfield and other NOAA officials who are participating in a legitimate debate is bad, bad policy, and it’s not good for science either.

I concur. If there’s one single official in our whole entire government who has actually done a good job in the past 12 months, it’s Max Mayfield. Calling for him, of all people, to resign or be fired is downright idiotic.