Two or three times each year before hurricane season, some "expert" group issues their prediction for the season, and no matter what it is, "highly active" or "quiet," the news media gets all excited and jumps all over it. These predictions are really of no value, other than giving the news media something to use to boost readership or viewership and try to whip them into a frenzy. We point this out at least once a year.
We say these long range predictions have no value for three reasons. (1) They aren't accurate. Historically their records are dismal. (2) They don't predict where they will go. The area they cover is vast, covering the entire Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the far western Atlantic ocean all the way up the eastern coast of the US and Canada. What happens one place has no affect on a location a couple hundred miles away, so saying there will be eight named storms this year is so generalized, it's meaningless. (3) It makes no difference how many storms there will be. You can't prepare any differently. You must be prepared each year to watch storms as they form, and then take appropriate action if the current one heads toward you.
To our audience of cruisers, the numbers of predicted storms are even more meaningless. Cruise lines monitor the storms from the moment they form, and move their ships out of the way. They don't want their half-billion-dollar assets anywhere close to harms way. Now that may mean your cruise will not follow the exact itinerary as you planned (or it could even be completely changed), but it does almost guarantee that your vacation will happen - as opposed if you plan a land-based vacation that happens to be in the projected path of the storm. Occasionally, very occasionally, it does affect your port of embarkation (or disembarkation) on turnaround day, and that does create some turmoil, but generally, it means things operate a day late, and the cruise line assists in some way getting you there at the proper time.
Finally, someone seems to be agreeing with us. Our friends at the National Center for Public Policy Research are taking National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to task for the lack of accuracy of their long-range forecasts of hurricane seasons, because they too have discovered they really aren't very accurate - especially considering the time and money spent on them because, according to the Center, we as humans just don't know enough about our atmosphere yet.
So the National Center for Public Policy Research published the video below that will pit their expert's forecast (which was much less costly to produce) against NOAA's forecast.
As the Center says in their press release, the intent of the video isn't to needle NOAA for their erroneous forecasts, but to make the point about how little we understand about our climate. NOAA does provide a vital service in tracking the storms once they form and then predicting their paths in the short term, and we wouldn't want to do without them there.
The Center does make an interesting offer to NOAA however. "If, at the end of the hurricane season, Dr. Hansimian's forecast turns out to be more accurate than NOAA's, we challenge the agency to make him an honorary member of NOAA's hurricane specialists unit," said David Ridenour of the Center. "In return, if NOAA's forecast is more accurate, we'll include a prominently-displayed mea culpa on our website." They are still waiting to hear back from NOAA.
