Fay is deja vu 1997 Danny - from HurricaneCity.com Message Board

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Posted by Kenneth E. Lamb (kennethelamb) on 8/21/2008, 4:51 am

If you want a close example of Fay's current behavior, try Hurricane Danny in 1997.

In the words of the NHC's official critique, "On the 16th, 17th, and early on the 18th of July, there were some fairly large underforecasts of the intensity. Part of this was due to an underprediction of the fast strengthening of Danny to a hurricane while it was near the coast, and part was due to moving the cyclone inland too soon in the forecasts."

That's a politically correct history.

I tried to get quotes from the Discussion archives, but 1997 is missing - really - no joke, the NHC doesn't have any of 1997's storm discussions and advisories in its publicly accessible archives!

So here it is from my covering the storm for the Miami Herald when Danny sat in Mobile Bay.

The NHC kept putting out "it's gonna do this, and it's gonna do that" advisories. None occurred as advertised. After 3 days the discussion got so frustrated that the forecaster wrote along the lines of "we don't know what Danny is going to do."

Well, you gotta applaud the guy's honesty.

Fay is Danny deja vu. The NHC and its models go dead when Tropical Cyclones (TCs) move under 5 - 7 knot range. The reliability of the models for Fay are abysmal even without that slow of a speed.

It seems obvious their HWRF has some very serious problems linking up to the globals. You have to have the intellectual honesty to discuss the NHC's devotion to the HWRF. I was appalled the other night when I heard Jim spell out on the video that Fay was nearly dead in the water (movement-wise) south of Cuba, and that the movement to the north had already begun, or at the least it appeared the turn was beginning way earlier than the NHC thought. What happened when Jim noted this?

Some humming and hawing and mumbled rambling why that observation wasn't reality.

Wrong. Jim was all over it. The NHC wasn't.

I see this throughout the process with Fay. IMHO, the NHC is in total submission to its HWRF model. I sometimes feel they think it is an email from God.

There has to be a certain level of respectful disagreement allowed when discussing scientific subjects such as Tropical Cyclone forecasting. The NHC can't be put above criticism when it's merited. Fay is demonstrating some very serious shortcomings at NHC.

In addition to model-devotion, I believe there is a lack of human intervention occurring that adds to the model problem.

Take my story about Jim's program observations, and how they were treated (as I heard them, anyway). The fact is that the storm was not moving any longer, the models were wrong, and knowing it was as undeniable as the recon reports proved.

But this undeniable evidence was being ignored, or at the least, severely discounted. That is exactly what happened with Danny, and this is now happening with Fay.

My points?

1) It is time for a re-evaluation at NHC over its devotion to the models, particularly when they conflict with real data.

2) It's going to take more than a "low confidence" disclaimer to rebuild public confidence in the NHC forecasts. Respectfully, the NHC spends a lot of time in self-righteousness mode, or at the least, self-justification mode. It's never their fault, no matter how poorly they communicated to the public.

3) Looking for loopholes in their discussions to explain away those poor communications just isn't good enough. The NHC is not God; they need to understand it's OK to just spell it out in big, bold letters - "WE DON'T HAVE A CLUE."

The reason it's OK to say that is because we can see that they don't. And it's time to give us credit for being intelligent enough about this area of scientific inquiry to understand that NOBODY has any better clues than they do either. In short, it's OK to be human and admit your limitations.

I've noted where "attitude" is contributing to their problems. And so is "technique" when it undervalues hard data observations.

Hopefully, Fay will be a point where this discussion can begin.
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