On Fri, 22 Sep 2017 05:29:10 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 9/21/2017 7:28 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:35:26 -0400,
wrote:

On Thu, 21 Sep 2017 15:09:52 -0400, wrote:

I started losing faith in these plots with Irma. They had it 100%
going up the east coast 3 days out and in 48 hours it was right over
us. Our local guy was better than NOAA on the last day, predicting the
eye wall hitting within minutes of being right.


===

The problem with forecasting the Irma track was getting the timing
right for the turn northward. Even a small error created a
substantial lateral shift because of the geometry.

That is always the issue. If these things just went on a straight
line, it would be easy to predict where they go ;-)

Jose has been about the screwiest one I have seen for a while and
Maria may be running through the same confused air.
The water up north is cool enough so this will not be a major storm,
even if they take a hit but it doesn't take a major storm to affect a
lot of people. Sandy was just a strong tropical storm at landfall. A
day of "inch an hour" rain would flood places full of people who never
thought they could flood. That was what Agnes did to us in Clinton and
that was only about 6-8" of rain in a day. It just could not drain
away fast enough in upland communities.



Just woke up and we are still be hit with strong wind gusts and rain
squalls from Jose. Haven't checked the weather map yet be it obviously
hasn't moved much in three days.

As for hurricane tracking in general, it's still a guessing game but
there's also no question that the weather people have become much better
at forecasting a general track, given all the influences. I was
watching the Weather Channel the other day and they were talking about
the two prime computer models they use ... GFS and Euro. The Euro has
had a much better record of being accurate. One of them (forget which)
underwent a major update a year or so ago and it was noticed that the
update made the software more inaccurate than the original. They went
back to using the original.


Hurricane tracking is a participation sport around here and I put a
lot of the tools on our community web site for our residents
(http://esteroriverheights.com/)