Hurricane Outlooks Show Little Worth

RALEIGH, N.C. | Each April, weather wizard William Gray emerges from his burrow near the Rocky Mountains to offer his forecast for the six-month hurricane season that starts June 1. And the news media are there, breathlessly awaiting his every word.

It's a lot like Groundhog Day - and the results are worth just about as much.

"The hairs on the back of my neck don't stand up," ho-hums Craig Fugate, director of emergency management for Florida, the state that got raked by four hurricanes - three of them "major" - in 2004. When it comes to preparing, he says, these long-range forecasts "are not useful at all."

The AP contacted the emergency management agency in every coastal state from Texas to Maine and asked whether these seasonal forecasts play any role in their preparations for the hurricane season. Their response was unanimous: They're a great way to get people thinking about the upcoming season, but that's about it.

Regardless, since the former Colorado State University climatologist pioneered the seasonal predictions in 1984, other forecasters have followed suit.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Tropical Storm Risk Consortium in London and, most recently, the Coastal Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at North Carolina State University in Raleigh are now among teams attempting to handicap the storm season weeks or months ahead.

After high-profile, back-to-back busts by Gray and others, critics have questioned whether these long-range outlooks do more harm than good. But the very question presupposes that Gray, et al., have been promising more than they can deliver.

They can pretty accurately predict an above- or below-average season, even predict the likelihood a major storm will hit SOMEWHERE along the U.S. coast. Beyond that, they're not promising anything.

"Honestly, I think people get a lot more excited about it than I do in terms of what its usefulness is," says CSU scientist Phil Klotzbach, who has largely taken over the hurricane work of Gray, now semiretired.

From the beginning, Gray issued disclaimers with his forecasts, like the one from May 1989 that asserted the forecast "can only predict about 50 percent of the total variability in Atlantic seasonal hurricane activity."

NC State's Lian Xie says in a bold-letters disclaimer in his 2008 forecast: "Results presented herein are for scientific information exchange only ... Users are at their own risk for using the forecasts in any decision making."

So how did these things become such a big deal?

Fugate thinks part of the problem is that the media and some public officials picked up the cloudy crystal ball and ran with it.

"Particularly national media has been using these forecasts inappropriately," he says. "I'm as guilty as anyone else."

Hurricane-prediction researchers are like chefs tinkering with a recipe for the same dish, and working from the same list of ingredients: In this case, decades worth of data from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

Studying past seasons, scientists look for patterns that might explain why one year was more active than another. Teams have developed computer models that emphasize different conditions - everything from ocean salinity and rainfall amounts over West Africa to sunspot cycles and the influences of the Pacific warm-water current known as El Nino.

They test their theories by "hindcasting" - basically, plugging in known conditions from past storm seasons and seeing how well the models recreate the historical results.

When Gray burst onto the scene a quarter century ago, some wondered what business a man nearly 2,000 miles from the Atlantic had predicting hurricanes. Still, writing about his predictions became a rite of spring. (The Associated Press transmits urgent stories for his initial Dec. l forecast, and for the April, June and August updates.)

But as Max Mayfield, former longtime director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, puts it: "You need to be prepared, no matter what the numbers are."