Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Monday, June 01, 2009 7:31:52 PM
Time to place your bets on this years hurricane season! Will it be a bad one, or will it finally calm down? Well, here are your 2009 predictions brought to you by the
NOAA and the University of Colorado.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's predicts a 70% chance of:
- Named storms: 9-14
- Hurricanes: 4-7
- Major hurricanes: 1-3
The other major forecaster in the U.S., the University of Colorado, recently revised down its expectations for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season:
- Named storms: 12
- Hurricanes: 6
- Major hurricanes: 2
Further, the Colorado forecasters predicted the following probabilities that a major hurricane could strike the U.S., all of which are about average for the past century:
- Entire U.S. coastline: 54%
- U.S. East Coast (including peninsula Florida): 32%
- Gulf Coast (from the Florida Panhandle westward to Brownsville, Texas): 31%
- Caribbean: Average
They did pretty good
last year on thier estimates. Wasn't sure they were going to get there, but a few late season storms saved their predictions.
These are always fun because once a large one, say a category 4 or 5 comes, the global warming nutters come out of the wood-work. Obviously, I don't wish any hurricanes to do any damage or take any lives, (but we insist on living near the beach, so that is the risk) but it is funny to see the nutters start in on the 'lack of inaction' talk and the future consequences of that inaction.
Who knows anyway? In 2005
the 'experts' said global warming was causing more hurricanes. In 2008
the 'experts' said global warming is not the cause. Guess we need to funnel more money to the climate scientists so they can study it some more...or something.