Don't bet on those Atlantic hurricane forecasts

Coincidentally, 2005 was also the year Xie and his students published a groundbreaking paper in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters.” In it, they suggested that the interplay of sea surface temperatures in the tropical North and South Atlantic, and not El Nino, was responsible for Florida’s disastrous 2004 season.

The following year, NC State felt confident enough to issue its forecast publicly. In a release, the university’s PR department would later crow that its “was the only national model to accurately forecast Atlantic hurricane activity” in 2006.

Unfortunately, NC State’s 2007 forecast was as off as anyone’s.

This season, Xie and master’s student Elinor Keith are forecasting 13 to 15 named storms, but again with caveats — the highest probability they offer for any particular number in that range is 11 percent. They predict six to eight of those storms will become hurricanes — but put the probability of seven occurring at just over 14 percent.

“So even though that’s the most likely answer, compared to some other numbers, that’s still a small number, right?” says Xie. “People need to have that in mind.”

Others have decided that there is need to qualify their forecasts, as well. Klotzbach says his next update will include an extra section “that deals with forecast uncertainty.”

Stressing what forecasts are not
And when NOAA released its 2008 outlook last week, it included for the first time a pie chart showing the likelihood that its prediction of 12 to 16 named storms was accurate. The verdict: About 65 percent for the whole range.

“We want to best convey the forecast by telling the people what the forecast is and what it is not,” lead forecaster Gerry Bell says. “This is NOT a landfall forecast. This does NOT imply levels of activity for any particular region.”

Gray insists that people DO use these forecasts to make strategic, real-world decisions. Ask him who, and he will suggest the reinsurance and Gulf oil-and-gas industries.

Platts, a division of McGraw-Hill that supplies information to the energy industry, publishes the forecasts. But chief economist Larry Chorn can’t think of anyone who takes any action based on them.

“It allows me to gauge what the experts are saying in terms of the likelihood of this being a mild season or a bad season,” he says. “Beyond that, I don’t know how to use them.”

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Lexington Insurance Co., an American International Group subsidiary, has helped fund Gray’s research for years. But Andrew P. Archambault, senior vice president, says Lexington doesn’t use them — and he can’t think of anyone else who does either.

There is some concern that average folk may be lulled into complacency by forecasts of a light storm season.

“They can go one or two ways,” Joseph Bruno, commissioner of the New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, says of the long-range predictions. “They can make people more apathetic than they already are about emergencies, or they can really heighten concern and alarm.”

But most seem to have figured out that they can’t plan their lives around the forecasts.

“Let’s say someone says this is going to be a really horrible hurricane season. Does that mean you close your business, lay off your employees?” says Melissa Perlman, who co-owns a small eco-resort in the beach town of Tulum on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. “I don’t really start paying attention until they are actually on the map.”

“It’s like Nostradamus,” adds Sonya Strasburg, who works at the Galveston Fishing Pier on the Texas barrier island — site of the nation’s deadliest hurricane. “I don’t believe it.”

Learn more when wrong?
So why keep doing them? Gray and Klotzbach opened this year’s forecast paper with that very question.

The answer they give: Because they add to the overall understanding of how hurricanes work.

“You actually learn more when you bust than when you verify,” says Gray, who retired from CSU in 2004 but continues to work with Klotzbach.

Another reason: Because people simply want to know.

“The truth is, every time I go to a conference, without fail, people come up to me and before they even ask about me or my family, they say, ‘What kind of a season are we going to have?”’ says Max Mayfield, former longtime director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Mayfield, now under contract with a Miami television station, sees no harm in the forecasts, as long as people are aware of their limitations. His favorite example is 1992.

Forecasts called for a below-average season that year, and it was — just six storms. The first one just happened to be Hurricane Andrew, which killed 23 people and did $26.5 billion in damage.

“I think it comes down to how people like you and me in the media portray this ...,” Mayfield says. “You need to be prepared no matter what the numbers are.”

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