Two more weatherbloggers have weighed in on the official start of hurricane season. Weather Channel meteorologist Matt Newman writes:

The first day of hurricane season appears to be off to a calm start. One must remember 1992 when Andrew struck Florida. Yes, it was in late August and it was the first named system of that season. Do not be fooled by a calm start. How active the season will be has no relationship to the impact on the U.S. All it takes is one tropical system to cause harm and destruction. Keep in mind, even tropical storms can be very dangerous.

Bottom Line: Everyone should always be prepared!

And weatherblogger extraordinaire Dr. Jeff Masters writes:

The hurricane season of 2006 is here! The date June 1 has taken on a notoriety second only to 9/11 in the consciousness of many of us, and the arrival of summer now has an ominous flavor–thanks to the unbelievable Hurricane Season of 2005. As I sat at my desk back on New Year’s Day this year writing a blog on Zeta, the 28th named storm of that season, I wondered if the Hurricane Season of 2005 would ever end. Would an endless series of tropical storms develop through the winter, making the traditional June 1 start of hurricane season seem meaningless? Well, I am happy to report that the atmosphere sometimes does behave in a logical and predictable way. We’ve had a normal five straight months of no tropical storm activity in the Atlantic, leading up to today’s official start to the season. And if you’re not ready for hurricane season yet, then the Atlantic Hurricane Gods have benevolently granted you an extension to your preparation period–this year’s season will have a slow start. …

High wind shear is going to be a severe impediment to tropical storm formation for at least the first two weeks of June. The jet stream has split into two branches–the polar jet, located over the northern U.S., and the subtropical jet, which is blowing over the Gulf of Mexico. As long as the subtropical jet is blowing over the Gulf of Mexico with 30 - 50 knots of wind like it is now, no tropical storm formation is likely in the Gulf. If we do get Tropical Storm Alberto in the next two weeks, it will have to form in the western Caribbean south of Cuba. Steering currents would then likely take the storm north across Cuba and then northeastward across the Bahamas and out to sea. The Gulf Coast from Texas to the Florida Panhandle will be protected from any tropical storms by the strong subtropical jet steam. I’m predicting only a 10% chance of a tropical storm in the Atlantic by June 15 this year.

The GFS model predicts that the subtropical jet will continue to generate high levels of wind shear over the prime June breeding grounds for hurricanes for at least the next 12 days. After that, I suspect the subtropical jet will weaken, and we will get one tropical storm forming in late June over the western Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico.

Dr. Masters is so confident in his prediction of a slow start to the season, he’s taking the next two weeks off:

Given that the next two weeks are likely to be the quietest time in what promises otherwise to be another long and busy hurricane season, I’m outta here. This will be my final “live” blog until June 13, as I’m taking my main summer vacation early. I plan to spend some time at Cape Hatteras before any hurricanes threaten! … If Alberto does surprise us while I’m gone, the other meteorologists at wunderground will post the latest analysis here for you.

Also on wunderground, over at weatherguy03’s blog, they’re having a prediction contest for when Alberto will form. Nearly everyone thinks he will form by the end of June, even though the climatological odds of that are around 50-50.

Along the same lines, but with more at stake, over at TradeSports.com you can actually bet money on which state(s) will get hit by major hurricanes this season (Florida has a clear lead, followed by Louisiana and then… New York?! Clearly, they’ve been drinking too much of the AccuWeather kool-aid), and what you think will be the last named storm of the season (Patty and Rafael are the favorites).

Speaking of names, Charles Fenwick takes a look at the history of this year’s set of names. He calls the exercise “a little bit of fun (in the weather geek sense) for the start of hurricane season.” The only one I have a strong recollection of is Hurricane Gordon, which in 1994 seemed for a while like a legitimate threat to hit New England, where I was an eighth-grader at the time. But it confounded forecasters and took a wacky southward turn, and ultimately weakened before hitting Florida as a tropical storm.

The National Hurricane Center’s first Atlantic Tropical Weather Outlook of 2006 has just been issued, meaning the Atlantic hurricane season is officially underway. Excerpt:

TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK
NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL
530 AM EDT THU JUN 01 2006

FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC…CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO…

TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION IS NOT EXPECTED THROUGH FRIDAY.

TODAY MARKS THE FIRST DAY OF THE ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON…WHICH WILL RUN UNTIL NOVEMBER 30TH.

That’s from Forecaster Beven. He then proceeds to go through the list of names for the coming season, followed by a summary of the various NHC advisory products. Nothing too exciting, I’m afraid. But the bottom line is, the season has begun.

As I pointed out before, this is really an arbitrary milestone. The statistical likelihood of tropical storm formation increased only infinitesimally, if at all, between yesterday and today. Still, we’ve now officially crossed that imaginary line in the sand, and there’s no going back — at least not until November 30.

Dmytro from NDLS called me a few hours ago and left me a voicemail wishing me a “Happy Hurricane Season.” Heh.

Here is The Storm Track’s post kicking off the season. Bryan minces no words:

Ready or not, Hurricane Season 2006 is here! What will this year have in store? Some fear mongers from AccuWeather (*cough* Bastardi *cough*) want nothing more than media attention and will pray on your fear to get it. (I can say that. Many thanks to State of Connecticut for extending journalism protections to the Internet.) Insurance companies, especially those based overseas and free of domestic political pressure, are cancelling policies up and down the East Coast as they are finally recognizing that hurricane losses are exceeding official government estimates. Did I mention that the National Weather Service is part of the Executive Branch?

He goes on to say, “I would not want to own property on the Outer Banks this year,” and then takes a look at the potential for tropical development right now, given the sea-surface temperatures. (Tropical-storm activity is possible over a wide area, but only the northern Caribbean has warm water deep enough to “support real hurricane activity” at the moment. That’s pretty typical for June.)

Speaking of “typical for June,” Charles Fenwick points out that “even with all of the above average activity [since 1995], on average, the first tropical storm didn’t form until 30 days into the season, and the first hurricane didn’t form until 63 days into the season.” He shares my concern that all this unprecedented start-of-hurricane-season hype may cause a backlash if nothing much happens in the tropics over the next few weeks… which would not be at all unusual, nor necessarily indicative of a less-active-than-expected rest of the season.

Anyway… stay tuned for hurricane coverage here on the Irish Trojan’s Blog throughout the season. I’ll be doing my share of weather-blogging (when I’m not at work) over the coming months, especially once there are active storms out there, but in addition to that, I’m hoping to introduce my new “hurricane guestbloggers” within the next few days. And of course, you should be sure to peruse my list of links at top right. In particular, Fenwick and Dr. Jeff Masters are superstars when it comes to cogent analysis of the storms once they form. It was their blog posts, in addition to the computer models and NHC advisories, that really provided the source material for much of my Katrina-blogging last year. They deserve more credit than they’ve gotten for “sounding the alarm” just as vigorously as I was. And unlike me, they actually have the meteorological education to prove they know what they’re talking about! :) Anyway, I highly advise reading their blogs if you want to know what’s going on in the tropics. The Storm Track, too, and the others linked in my right sidebar.

P.S. Oh, and one other thing I wanted to mention. The Weather Channel is airing the “lost episode” of “It Could Happen Tomorrow” — the one they filmed before Katrina about the hypothetical New Orleans doomsday scenario — on Sunday at 9:00 PM Eastern and Pacific. Should be interesting.

P.P.S. With regard to my hurricane blogroll… if anyone has any suggestions for worthwhile sites that I’m missing, please leave them in comments!

The hurricane season hasn’t even started yet, and already I’ve made my first mistake: the computer model track that I gleefully linked to earlier was a test, not anything based on a real storm, according to Charles Fenwick (who, unlike me, is an actual meteorologist, or at least a Ph.D. student in meteorology). My apologies for the error!!

Anyway… the first Tropical Weather Outlook should be out in about 3 1/2 hours…

Will I rue these words?

From the way the media and politicans are talking about [June 1] — from the ominous tones in which they refer to “the start of hurricane season” — you’d think that at the stroke of midnight tonight, a bevy of Category Five hurricanes will spontaneously form off the U.S. coast and start moving toward land.

Well, let me make my first Official Weather Nerd Prediction^TM of the 2006 season: that ain’t gonna happen. :)

Hmm… well, looky here, it’s not even midnight yet, and already, something has caught the computer models’ attention. [CORRECTION: It’s a test, not a real storm. Sorry!] And Weather Channel Senior Meteorologist Stu Ostro writes: “hopefully not an omen, but maybe it is — there’s already a disturbance spinning in the Gulf of Mexico and an unusually large amount of convection in the deep tropical Atlantic for so early.”

But, uh, I’m still pretty confident in my prediction. :)

Of more genuine significance is this article (hat tip: Kristy), which reveals that New Orleans is sinking much faster than previously thought — a fact which may help explain some of last year’s levee failures, and may spell trouble for this year and future years:

(more…)

With less than 24 hours until the Atlantic hurricane season officially gets underway, I have to point something out. It feels very strange, as someone who has been following hurricanes for nearly two decades, to see the near-frenzy surrounding the date June 1. (It reminds me of how I felt, as a long-time political junkie and Electoral College nerd, about the sudden explosion of media interest in the electors’ formal voting process in December 2000.) From the way the media and politicans are talking about it — from the ominous tones in which they refer to “the start of hurricane season” — you’d think that at the stroke of midnight tonight, a bevy of Category Five hurricanes will spontaneously form off the U.S. coast and start moving toward land.

Well, let me make my first Official Weather Nerd Prediction^TM of the 2006 season: that ain’t gonna happen. :)

The fact is, there’s nothing special or magical about the “first day of hurricane season.” Mother Nature, you see, doesn’t own a calendar. Tropical storms can form before June 1 (just as they can form after November 30, as we learned last year). Such “pre-season” tropical storms are, admittedly, rare — but then again, it’s also rare for tropical storms to form in early June! Indeed, if you were to compare the likelihood of storm formation on May 31 versus June 1, the difference would be virtually nil. Like most beginning and ending dates of “seasons,” the boundaries of the hurricane season are fundamentally arbitrary. The climatological reality is that there is a slow climb through the spring and summer toward the peak of tropical activity in mid-September, and then a slow decline from there — not a sudden start and a sudden stop.

Of course, I say all this as someone who loves to observe, document and comment on arbitrary milestones. My parents, who endured my obsessive chronicling of a family car reaching 100,000 miles not once, not twice, but three times (with three different cars), can attest to that, and I’m sure regular blog readers can think of various examples as well (frequent discussion of Daylight Saving Time transitions comes to mind). So I’m not knocking the phenomenon of giving undue weight to utterly arbitrary temporal milestones. I’m just amused that so many people are joining me on this occasion in that peculiar pastime. :)

Anyway, when we all wake up on Thursday, I can think of two things that will be different, hurricane-wise. One, the National Hurricane Center will resume publishing its Tropical Weather Outlook four times a day (and you can bet I’ll post the first one, which I believe will be published at 2:30 AM MST, here on the blog before going to work Thursday morning). Two, the Weather Channel will start broadcasting its “Tropical Update” every hour at :50 after the hour. Both of these developments are very exciting for me personally, but I can’t imagine why anyone else would care. Hehe.

I’m being a bit silly, of course. I understand perfectly well why the “near-frenzy” is occurring. From the media’s perspective, the approach of June 1 is an obvious “hook” to justify publishing long-planned post-Katrina features, back-burner hurricane stories, and scene-setting articles about impending doom (always a favorite journalistic topic, but much more salient than usual after last year). And from the politicians’ and public officials’ perspectives, the official start of the season is an excellent opportunity, in light of heightened public receptiveness because of last year’s disasters, to try and get people’s attention and encourage prudent planning (something I, of course, whole-heartedly support). I just hope people won’t start resting easy or getting complacent — or complaining about “hype” — if the first few weeks of June come and go without any tropical activity whatsoever, which is precisely what climatology tells us is likely to happen.

Then again, you never know. Maybe we’ll have a Hurricane Alberto to worry about right away. The first two months of last season were very active, foreshadowing the insanity that was to come, so it certainly isn’t impossible. Personally, I’m hoping for a long season full of interesting, enchanting, beautiful, powerful hurricanes — that stay safely out to sea.

PLEASE NOTE: The original version of this post stated that the Tropical Weather Outlook is published “once a day at 5:30 AM EDT.” That’s not correct; it’s published four times a day, as this page makes clear. I believe the times are 5:30 and 11:30 AM and PM (4:30 and 10:30 afterDaylight Saving Time ends). Anyway, I apologize for the error.

Yet another prediction of an active hurricane season in 2006 (hat tip: Kat Palmore; see also Colin Pedicini)… but is anyone paying attention? (hat tip: A Nun Mouse).

This isn’t good:

A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by UC Berkeley’s civil engineering school said Sunday.

The findings undermine assurances by the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers that the federal levee repair program due to be completed in June will provide a higher level of protection to New Orleans, which sustained 1,293 deaths and more than $100 billion in property loss from Katrina.

The team’s 600-page report disputed most of the corps’ preliminary findings about what caused the levee breaches, saying the investigators had made critical errors in their analysis.

The mistakes raise concerns about whether the corps is competent to oversee public safety projects across the nation, said Raymond Seed, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who led the investigation, which the National Science Foundation sponsored shortly after Katrina struck.

“People think this is a New Orleans problem,” Seed said. “It is a national issue.”

Yikes. And this part sounds strikingly like what investigators said about NASA after the Columbia tragedy:

The group looked at the corps’ internal culture and resources and asserts that the corps’ technical competence has been eroding since the 1970s because of congressional pressure to streamline its organization and reduce project costs.

Robert Bea, a Berkeley engineering professor who began his career at the corps and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, said the corps had failed to recognize early warning signs that might have alerted it to levee problems before Katrina.

Responsibility for the failures, Bea said, extends well beyond the corps and includes many levee boards and other local political organizations.

A series of compromises resulted in substandard design and marginal quality in exchange for lower costs, Bea said.

“A culture of safety was replaced by a culture of efficiency,” said J. David Rogers, a geological engineering professor from the University of Missouri, Rolla.

(Hat tip: A Nun Mouse.)

I mentioned back in March that the private meteorologists at AccuWeather are claiming they have pioneered a technique for doing something that neither the National Hurricane Center nor the esteemed Dr. William Gray at Colorado State have ever seriously attempted: predicting in advance the specific regions that are most likely to be hit by landfalling hurricanes in a given year. “AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center research meteorologists have identified weather cycles that indicate which U.S. coastal areas are most susceptible to landfalls,” according to a press release quoted in that post. “Determination of where we are in the cycle has enabled AccuWeather.com meteorologists to accurately predict hurricane activity in Florida in 2004 and along the Gulf Coast last year.” [UPDATE: In comments, Charles Fenwick links to AccuWeather’s actual pre-2005 prediction, in which they highlighted the risk to Florida, the Carolinas and New England — not the Gulf Coast. He also points out that Colorado State has had a “Landfalling Hurricane Probability Project” since 2004.]

So, what are they predicting for this year? Well, as noted in March, they are extremely concerned about the potential for a landfall in the Northeastern U.S., either the New York/New Jersey area or New England. This map shows the predicted probability of hurricane strikes, compared to the average annual risk, in the various coastal areas:

“The greatest overall threat of a landfall will be on the Carolina coastline, but the greatest elevated threat, in relationship to averages, will be in New England,” this article explains. It also goes into more detail about why the forecasters think the Northeast is at greater-than-usual risk, and concludes: “Where we are in the decadal cycle, the influence of the cycle we have identified within this decadal cycle, and significantly warmer-than-normal northwestern Atlantic waters, all contribute to the increasing threat of a hurricane of the magnitude of 1938, 1944, and 1954 — perhaps even stronger. This current cycle of above-normal Atlantic basin activity has so far spared the Northeast, especially New England. However, we are entering a stage where one or two major Northeast hurricanes are of great concern within the next 10 years and, this year, the ingredients look ominous.”

This press release even provides a timetable for what we might expect this season:

“The 2006 season will be a creeping threat,” said Bastardi. “Early in the season — June and July — the Texas Gulf Coast faces the highest likelihood of a hurricane strike, possibly putting Gulf energy production in the line of fire. As early as July, and through much of the rest of the season, the highest level of risk shifts to the Carolinas. From mid-August into early October, the window is open for hurricane strikes to spread northward to the more densely populated Northeast coast. At the very end of the season, southern Florida also faces significant hurricane risk.”

“There are few areas of the U.S. East Coast and Gulf of Mexico that will not be in the bull’s eye at some point this season,” said Ken Reeves, AccuWeather’s Director of Forecast Operations. Ironically, though, the region that was hammered the hardest last year — the central and eastern Gulf Coast — has one of the lower probabilities of receiving another major hurricane strike in 2006.”

Added Reeves, “This is not to say that hard-hit New Orleans has nothing to worry about. Because the city’s defenses have been so compromised by Hurricane Katrina, even a glancing blow from a hurricane elsewhere could spell trouble for the city.” …

Said AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center Meteorologist Bernie Rayno, “With the exception of the southern tip of the Florida peninsula, almost all the damage wrought by last year’s storms in the U.S. occurred along the Gulf Coast. In recent history, it is the Gulf coast and the East Coast from the Carolinas southward that have borne the brunt of U.S. hurricane strikes. Because of this, people may be unaware that portions of the Northeast coast have been severely damaged by major hurricanes in the past, and that there is a dramatically increased likelihood that over the next five years the Northeast could be hit by a major hurricane. This could be the year.”

Rayno also noted that in general, the fast-moving nature of tropical cyclones in the Northeast will leave little time to protect property and lives. “Preparation is the key, since time is a perishable commodity when a hurricane is approaching the coast.”

Added Bastardi, “Because it has been decades since the Northeast was hit by a major hurricane, some residents in the Northeast have become complacent regarding the threat of a hurricane. It is for this reason that we have been warning of elevated danger from hurricanes in the Northeast since March, when we first identified that patterns that could lead to such an occurrence this year or in the near future.”

A hurricane making landfall in, or just southwest of, New York City, would be very, very bad. Indeed, if you’d asked me a couple of years ago which three major cities were most at risk of a true hurricane catastrophe, I would have said New Orleans, Miami and New York. Previous posts about “the NYC nightmare” here and here.

Hurricane season starts in just over two weeks, on June 1.

P.S. What I wrote in the second above-linked “NYC nightmare” post bears repeating:

The fact that such a hurricane would likely be moving so much faster than, say, Katrina, thus decreasing the preparation time, only makes it worse. Even a competent evacuation effort (as opposed to a Nagin-esque effort) might be woefully inadequate! The evacuation orders would need to be issued while the hurricane is waaay down south, off the Carolinas or even Georgia or Florida. The forecast would be, by its nature, extremely uncertain. And would New Yorkers, unused to hurricanes, take such an evacuation order seriously? I’m not sure.

You may recall that I had concerns about Wilma in this regard. At the time, Bryan Woods from The Storm Track accused me of fear-mongering: “There is a tropical system south of Cuba and you are talking about a landfall in New England?” I responded, “I just think it’s worth noting that this is a possibility, especially because, as I said, if it does happen, it will happen very quickly, and New Englanders/New Yorkers will be caught off-guard if they aren’t thinking about it before landfall in Florida. But, as I said, it’s unlikely to happen.” And, of course, it didn’t happen. But someday it will, and I was right about the “very quickly” business. Striking the right balance and making the right decision in preparing for this particular Big One, whenever it happens, is going to be really, really hard.

P.P.S. Not like New England needs a hurricane to cause serious flooding. In the great state of New Hampshire — where a hurricane landfall is quite unlikely, barring an extremely odd track bringing a storm ashore in Portsmouth :) — as well as Massachusetts and Maine, they’re having the worst flooding in decades, and it promises to get worse before it gets better. Dr. Jeff Masters has a cumulative Doppler radar image:

Yikes.

Meanwhile, in other hurricane-related news, the Eastern Pacific tropical season got underway on Monday. And out in the Western Pacific, the season’s first typhoon, Chanchu, is threatening Hong Kong and environs in China. It’s a Category 4, according to Dr. Masters, and is the strongest storm ever to threaten the city in the month of May, according to the AP. But Masters points out that “it is not unusual to get a supertyphoon in May, and this last happened in 2004, when Supertyphoon Nida reached Category 5 status with sustained winds of 160 mph.”

P.P.P.S. If anyone was wondering — which I’m sure no one was — why a blogger who is best known for his hurricane coverage doesn’t have a hurricane-related blog category more specific than “Weather, Natural Disasters, Space & Astronomy,” it’s because I simply haven’t had time yet to organize my old posts into a more fitting category scheme. Eventually, “Weather & Natural Disasters” will be a separate category from “Space & Astronomy,” and the former will have a subcategory specifically for “Hurricanes,” which will in turn have sub-subcategories like “2005 Hurricane Season” and “2006 Hurricane Season,” and sub-sub-subcategories like “Hurricane Katrina,” “Hurricane Rita,” etc. But, as you can imagine, it’s going to take a ton of legwork to get all that organized, precisely because of how many posts I have on the relevant topics. It was pretty easy to create a “Britney Spears” category out of whole cloth, because I only had 31 posts to re-categorize, and I could easily find them all by searching for the word “Britney.” Similarly, creating subcategories for “Harry Potter” and “Lord of the Rings” within “Sci-Fi & Fantasy” wasn’t all that difficult, and made for a nice study break a few days ago when I did it. :) But breaking up my weather posts into a more coherent organization will be significantly more difficult, especially because it involves categorizing, for the first time ever, my hundreds of hurricane-related posts from 2005, which were created during the interim period when I was on Blogger and thus didn’t have categories at all. However, it is something I intend to do in the next few weeks, once I get settled out in Phoenix. So, stay tuned.

With the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season less than a month away, there is considerable buzz in weather-nerd circles about the water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, there have been an awful lot of cloudless days down there, allowing the sunlight to really heat up the water and produce unseasonably warm SSTs. I’ve gotten a couple of e-mails about this, one from Eric of Erictek, a Purdue student, who compared the maps on this website and concluded that the water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico about three weeks ahead of where they were last year. For example, compare these maps:

Wow. Scary. Another e-mailer, Scott Fort, passes along a relevant excerpt from a local weatherman’s e-mail newsletter:

DATELINE: GULF OF MEXICO: Data buoy #42001 was reporting a water temperature of 80.1. A year ago at this time, it was 75.6. There is growing concern that the Gulf of Mexico, across the board, has warmer water temperatures than at this same time last year. And we all know what happened last year. This means that we could see an early start to the tropical storm season, although water temperature is just one piece of the pie.

When the sea surface temperature gets to the mid 80s, hurricanes really like that.

When it gets to about 86 or 87, it is like giving a kid all the candy he wants.

David Emory Stooksbury, from the University of Georgia, advises that sea surface temperatures reaching 82 does not normally occur until June.

This year, by early May, much of the Caribbean water had reached 82 degrees.

Not only are sea surface temperatures abnormally warm for early May, he reports, but the entire hurricane season is expected to be very active.

Indeed, Dr. William Gray is predicting a busy season, with a higher-than-usual chance of U.S. landfalls — although The Storm Track says, “It is worth noting that William Gray’s forecasts…since he has been giving them are less accurate than the 5 year running average.” But the point is, Dr. Gray and other experts believe the general atmospheric conditions are ripe for lots of storm formation — and once the storms form, if they move into the jacuzzi-like temps the Gulf of Mexico may have by that point, we could in for big trouble. Again.

[UPDATE/CORRECTION: As noted here, this post may be somewhat misleading. Charles Fenwick, who knows more about this stuff than me, says “SSTs can be volatile on a daily basis… it is more useful to look at at a longer term average and compare it to a long term norm.” And, looking at such an average, the sea-surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico are actually now lower than what they were last year, according to The Storm Track. (They’re still above normal, though.) PLEASE NOTE: The maps posted by Fenwick, and by a commenter on this post, purporting to show that the Gulf is now MUCH cooler than last year, are unintentionally misleading, as explained here. The colors are just bluer because they changed the scale, not because it’s cooler. Fenwick’s broader point, however, is correct.]

P.S. On a related note… does anyone want to volunteer to be a “hurricane guestblogger” — or perhaps I should say, guest weather nerd — this summer? I want to plan ahead for this: I assume that BrendanLoy.com will get heightened traffic anytime a storm is nearing the U.S. coast, because of last year… and yet, for the first time ever, I most likely won’t be able to blog at all during business hours on weekdays from late May through mid-August. (Blogging on the job is not exactly the first impression I want to make at my law firm!) This obviously presents something of a dilemma, as I don’t want to lose my status as a go-to blog for up-to-date hurricane info, insight, and links. So, I’m hoping to put together a small army of guest-nerds :) to help me keep things fresh, monitoring not just news sites, but NHC advisories and images, computer-model maps, and the handful of weather blogs that I routinely link to. (I feel like I should have training sessions or something… heh. No, but seriously, I will probably put together some sort of a basic “how to” document, as there are certain issues of timing, what’s important and what’s less so, etc., that one learns when one has been blogging hurricanes for four years and following them for about 17 years.) Because hurricane-blogging is kind of a specialized thing, I don’t know how many of my regular guestbloggers will want to do it on a regular basis… plus, the ability to help out in this regard is obviously contingent on having at least some ability to blog during business hours. Anyway, if anyone — current guestblogger or not — thinks they might be interested, please leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail (tips[at]brendanloy.com).

More than eight months after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin outlined an evacuation plan for his city on Tuesday.

Heh.

You’d think this development might remind Nagin’s constituents, who will decide on May 20 whether to re-elect him, that he didn’t seem to have an evacuation plan in place last August. I repeat: this is a guy whose lawyers were literally researching the legal ramifications of mandatory evacuations 36 hours before Katrina hit, even though the threat of a catastrophic, city-destroying hurricane had been anticipated for years. This is a guy who had to be interrupted during dinner and urged to call the National Hurricane Center on the Saturday night before the storm, apparently because he wasn’t in constant communication with them all along (?!?). This is a guy who, against all reason and logic (and contemporaneous urging on this blog), waited until 24 hours before landfall to order an evacuation, despite reams of studies showing that it would take 72 hours to empty his city. This is a guy who had no apparent strategy for helping people without private transportation get out of the city, even though everyone knew that thousands of such people existed, and even though his city had hundreds of school buses at its disposal that could have been used to carry those people out of the danger zone. (It’s useful at this point to remember that, in the true worst-case scenario, nearly all of those homes in the Ninth Ward would have been entirely underwater, and nearly all of those people who took shelter in their attics would have drowned long before they had a chance to take shelter at the Convention Center and blame the feds for taking so long to bring them aid.)

Well, I guess I shouldn’t say that Nagin had “no apparent streategy”; his strategy was to tell those people: “Go to the Superdome, which we think can withstand the winds, but we’re not really sure. There won’t be electricity, running water, a functional sewage system, or adequate food or water, but you’ll probably be better off there than in your homes. Probably.”

As I said before, it’s absolutely unbelieveable to me that the residents of New Orleans are seriously considering re-electing the mayor who fiddled while their city drowned. If Nagin wins, I think we will officially be able to declare, once and for all, that accountability is dead in this country.

All that said, it’s truly excellent that New Orleans now has a better plan in place, especially with the official start of hurricane season less than a month away. In particular, I’m happy to see that Mayor Nagin has learned from his mistake in not getting help from Amtrak. Under the new plan:

“Amtrak trains will also be used for evacuation purposes, which we’re really excited about,” Nagin said.

The new plan “relies more on buses and trains and eliminates the Superdome and Convention Center as shelters.” Good. Another excellent and important development: “In the future, evacuees will be allowed to bring pets with them [on evacuation buses] as long as they have some type of cage to safely put them in.” That won’t just save animal lives, it will save human lives, because some people simply will not leave their pets behind, no matter the danger.

But although this new plan sounds great (assuming they actually implement it when the time comes, unlike their previous plan, such as it was), it’s truly a tragedy that they didn’t have an adequate plan last August — and it’s not forgivable on the basis that “hindsight is 20/20.” As I said, the threat of a storm like Katrina (or far worse) was long anticipated and feared, and New Orleans’s previous “plan” was self-evidently inadequate. Its inadequacy didn’t just become apparent because it didn’t work; the plan, as implemented, obviously didn’t deal with the serious problems that everyone knew existed. If the plan’s flaws only became apparent to the general public in retrospect, that’s because officials lied about the plan to hide its flaws. City officials get credit for doing a good job with the traffic problems — the contraflow worked very well — but they did absolutely nothing of significance to help those without private transportation.

I realize that my harping on this point, more than eight months later, may rub some people the wrong way, seeing as how New Orleans has seemingly learned from its mistakes, and the “blame game” is out of fashion these days. But I’m sorry, I believe in accountability, and I just can’t forgive that easily when the mistakes manifestly should never have been made in the first place, and those mistakes had very serious consequences, including the deaths of scores — maybe hundreds — of people.

P.S. Bayou View has a good post about the new evacuation plan and the future of the Gulf Coast.

(more…)

AccuWeather is predicting a busy hurricane season for 2006, and is sounding the alarm about the possibility of a major hurricane hitting the Northeast, noting that such an event is “overdue.” Of course, in and of itself, that’s a virtually meaningless statement; Mother Nature is under no obligation to follow the law of averages, as Florida knows all too well. But AccuWeather’s meteorologists “likened current weather cycles and water temperatures to those in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, particularly the pattern that led to the 1938 hurricane that struck Providence, R.I., and killed 600 people,” according to the AP. I’m not sure exactly what that means; generally speaking, trying to predict where hurricanes are likely to strike in a given season (or series of seasons, i.e. “the next five years,” as the AP article states) is a total waste of energy. But, hey, people in the Northeast (especially New York City) do need to take this threat more seriously, and prepare for it more vigorously, so if this helps, then good. (Hat tip: Colin Pedicini.)

UPDATE: Here is the actual press release from AccuWeather. Excerpt:

The northeast U.S. coast could be the target of a major hurricane, perhaps as early as this season, according to research announced today by the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center. In terms of number of storms, the 2006 hurricane season will again be more active than normal, but less active than last summer’s historic storm season.

“The Northeast is staring down the barrel of a gun,” said Joe Bastardi, Chief Forecaster of the AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center. “The Northeast coast is long overdue for a powerful hurricane, and with the weather patterns and hydrology we’re seeing in the oceans, the likelihood of a major hurricane making landfall in the Northeast is not a question of if but when.”

AccuWeather.com Hurricane Center research meteorologists have identified weather cycles that indicate which U.S. coastal areas are most susceptible to landfalls. “If you examine past weather cycles that have occurred in the Atlantic, you will see patterns of storms,” added Ken Reeves, Expert Senior Meteorologist and Director of Forecasting Operations at AccuWeather.com. “Determination of where we are in the cycle has enabled AccuWeather.com meteorologists to accurately predict hurricane activity in Florida in 2004 and along the Gulf Coast last year. There are indications that the Northeast will experience a hurricane larger and more powerful than anything that region has seen in a long time.”

If that’s true, I think it represents a major breakthrough in long-range hurricane forecasting. But here I am somewhat out of my depth, so I’ll defer to the actual meteorologists, rather than those who just play meteorologists on the internet (i.e., me). :)

P.S. Also:

Additionally, AccuWeather.com believes that the upper Texas coast is likely to be the target of higher than normal hurricane and tropical storm activity over the next 10 years. “Hurricane Rita was a warning shot,” says AccuWeather.com’s Bastardi… “The Texas coast is in for a long period of tropical activity, particularly the region from Corpus Christi to Sabine Pass at the Louisiana border.”

Heh:

The National Weather Service announced Friday that, in response to the increasing number of hurricanes, it is revising its naming system. “The hundreds of hurricanes we expect in the North Atlantic in 2006 will receive both proper and surnames,” Max Mayfield of the weather service said. “In fact, tropical storms Alberto Fergus, Beverly Stenwick-Brown, and Chris Stubbs Jr. have already received names under the new system.” After all possible first and last names are exhausted, storms will be given titles, beginning with Hurricane Assistant Accounts Manager Alexander Epps, CPA.

Hehe. That’s from The Onion, of course… as is this:

In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

LOL!

P.S. Also: Kobe Bryant Named As 2008 Olympic Basketball Team. :)

Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff on the prospect of hurricanes in 2006 hitting areas of the Gulf Coast that are hyper-vulnerable as they try to recover from the calamity that was 2005: “I personally am very concerned.”

This problem isn’t unique to the Gulf Coast, of course. New Orleans is a special case, but as for the rest of the affected areas, this is a normal post-landfall worry — and rightfully so. It takes time to recover from a hurricane, especially a devastating one like Katrina. But as Florida learned in 2004, Mother Nature doesn’t always abide by our recovery timetables. We can only hope that she’ll be a bit more cooperative this year than she has been in the last two.

Hmm… so let’s see… we’re in the midst of an extremely active hurricane period that, depending on who you believe, will either last another decade or so (due to natural cycles) or continue indefinitely (due to global warming)… in the last two years, eight hurricanes have hit Florida, three of the six most intense hurricanes in the recorded history of the Atlantic basin have formed, and the costliest hurricane in U.S. history has destroyed a major city and devastated a whole region… and all indications are that there’s more where those came from. Sounds like an excellent time to downsize the National Weather Service, don’t you think?

Amid one of the busiest hurricane periods in decades, the National Weather Service has drafted a plan to offer early retirement to 1,000 employees, including dozens of veteran workers in Florida.

As part of a cost-cutting move, the agency wants to replace 68 high-paid employees in the state, many of them forecasters, and either cut the positions or replace them with junior staff.

Thirteen of the 42 staff members at the National Hurricane Center in Miami would qualify for the early retirement.

With Florida still recovering from eight hurricanes in two years, and another busy season predicted, the proposal makes some people nervous.

“That’s the most ridiculous budgetary policy decision I’ve ever heard, when you’re dealing with a matter of life and death, of inbound hurricanes,” said Sen. Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who sits on the Senate subcommittee that oversees the agency.

“That’s the kind of thing you don’t want to scrimp on because of budget reasons,” he said.

We can afford a Blank Check to Nowhere, pork projects as far as the eye can see, and all manner of elective tax breaks… yet apparently we can’t afford to pay senior meteorologists’ salaries during a period of heightened meteorological peril. Amazing.

(Hat tip: A Nun Mouse.)

Hurricane expert Dr. William Gray’s initial forecast for the 2006 hurricane season is out. It says: “We foresee another very active Atlantic basin tropical cyclone season in 2006. However, we do not expect to see as many landfalling major hurricanes in the United States as we have experienced in 2004 and 2005.” The forecast says there will be 17 named storms (vs. 26 this year and 10 in an average year), 9 hurricanes (vs. 14 this year and 6 in an average year), and 5 intense hurricanes (vs. 7 this year and 2 in an average year).

Of course, Dr. Gray, while widely respected, isn’t always right. His initial forecast for this season, issued at this time last year, stated, “We foresee a slightly above-average hurricane season for the Atlantic basin in 2005. Also, an above-average probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is anticipated. We do not, however, expect anything close to the U.S. landfalling hurricane activity of 2004.” In retrospect, those words seem almost comical.

Dr. Gray’s predicted totals, as of last December, for this season? 11 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes. Even by early August of this year, Dr. Gray had upped his predicted totals to just 20, 10 and 6 — still well short of the final totals (26, 14 and 7).

My point isn’t to criticize Dr. Gray — rather, I am suggesting that it’s unlikely, IMHO, that a long-range forecast would ever predict a season as absurdly active as 2005. Even amid a cycle of active tropical activity, this season was a freak of nature.

But — somebody please correct me if I’m wrong — I strongly suspect that 17 named storms is the most Dr. Gray has ever called for in his initial prediction. It’s a sign of how ridiculously busy the 2005 season really was that 17 storms sounds like a relief. In fact, such a season would tie 1969 for the fourth-busiest in recorded history (behind 26 in 2005, 21 in 1933, and 19 in 1995).

Meanwhile, as we look ahead to the 2006 hurricane season, the 2005 season — which was supposed to have ended last Thursday morning at midnight — is still going strong. The NHC’s latest discussion on Hurricane Epsilon is notably tentative — not surprising, considering that this “impossible storm” has made them look like fools several times already:

WE HAVE SAID THIS BEFORE AT TIMES DURING THE PAST SEVERAL NIGHTS…ONLY TO HAVE EPSILON MAKE A COMEBACK THE FOLLOWING MORNING… BUT EPSILON REALLY DOES NOT APPEAR AS STRONG THIS EVENING AS IT DID THIS AFTERNOON. …

OCEAN TEMPERATURES STEADILY INCREASE ALONG THE FORECAST TRACK… BUT THE ATMOSPHERE WILL NOT LIKELY COOPERATE IN PROVIDING AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH EPSILON CAN SURVIVE VERY LONG AS A TROPICAL CYCLONE. SOON EPSILON WILL NO LONGER BE EMBEDDED IN THE DEEP WESTERLY STEERING CURRENT OF THE PAST SEVERAL DAYS… AND BY ABOUT 36 HOURS IT WILL PROBABLY BEGIN WEAKENING FAIRLY QUICKLY. BY THAT TIME STRONG NORTHWESTERLY WINDS TO THE WEST OF A SHARP UPPER-LEVEL TROUGH AXIS SHOULD SHEAR EPSILON… TO PIECES IF THE DYNAMICAL MODEL DEPICTIONS OF THE CIRCULATION ARE ANY INDICATION. EVEN THE GFDL FORECASTS THE REMNANT LOW TO DISSIPATE BY 120 HOURS. THE SHIPS GUIDANCE HAS NOT PERFORMED WELL DURING EPSILON THUS FAR… IN PART DUE TO A LACK OF MANY SYSTEMS LIKE THIS IN THE DEVELOPMENTAL DATABASE. SHIPS CONTINUES TO INSIST ON STEADY WEAKENING… WHICH STILL MIGHT NOT HAPPEN DURING THE FIRST 24 HOURS OR SO… BUT SHIPS PROBABLY HAS THE RIGHT IDEA BEGINNING IN ABOUT 36 HOURS ONCE THE SHEAR REALLY KICKS IN. SO EPSILON’S DAYS APPEAR TO BE NUMBERED… WITH THAT NUMBER PROBABLY BEING LESS THAN FIVE… AND THE NEW OFFICIAL FORECAST ONLY HOLDS ON TO A REMANT LOW THROUGH 96 HOURS. OTHERWISE THE PACE OF WEAKENING IN THE NEW OFFICIAL FORECAST IS SIMILAR TO THE PREVIOUS ADVISORY.

Heh.