Hurricane forecasts

Dr. William Gray, the famous hurricane forecaster at Colorado State University, predicts more hurricane fun (More hurricanes coming):

Gray is calling for three more named storms this month, with two growing into hurricanes and one becoming a major hurricane of Category 3 or above. That's nearly double the average storm activity for October.

His Colorado State forecast team also predicts a 49 percent chance that a tropical storm or hurricane will make landfall somewhere along the U.S. coastline this month. The average for October is 29 percent.

There is some evidence that these predictions aren't bogus:

Gray's team nailed forecasts for August and September, with only minor discrepancies between his predictions and what actually happened. At the beginning of the season, he said to expect an above-average year.

But, this is a WEATHER forecast. The same type of forecast that macroeconomics forecasts are disparagingly compared to. At the beginning of hurricane season the WSJ's Numbers Guy noticed that his naive forecasts did about as good a job as the hurricane forecasters at CSU and the National Hurricane Center.

From Hypothetical Bias (shameless plug to my bogus blog):

And today the WSJ's Numbers Guy takes a look at seasonal hurricane forecasts (In Hurricane Forecasting, Science Is Far From Exact) and finds that they are somewhat bogus:

In recent weeks, CNN, MSNBC and CBS -- and dozens of newspapers around the country -- all reported forecasts by Colorado State professor William Gray, the pioneer of long-range hurricane predicting, of eight hurricanes this year (revised up from seven in April). Other forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Florida State University and University College London project between six and eight hurricanes.

But my examination of forecasters' records over the past six years -- the period in which all four groups have been publicizing their predictions before the hurricane season begins -- shows that none do much better than a simple five-year average, a number that can be derived without expertise in climatology or statistics (more on this in a moment) ...

... It turns out that all four forecasts have missed by between 1.3 and 1.5 hurricanes each year. But a more simplistic method, a five-year moving average of hurricane counts, does just as well, missing by an average of 1.4 hurricanes each year.

Don't reverse those lanes just yet.

Comments

[M1EK]

Grey's forecasts are more accurately very-short-term climatology -- he doesn't predict what the (weather) will be like any particular day or even week.

He also makes a name for himself as the pet skeptic of GW deniers -- despite having little to no experience with climatology on the scale the climate-change researchers study.