Hurricane Hysteria

[Wake-up!]

Hurricane Matthew Follow-up:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2016/10/26/no-hurricane-intensity-is-not-exaggerated-to-scare-people-and-heres-how-we-know/

An interesting article aimed at slamming drudgereport.com, but offering a decent overview of the tools forecasters use to track hurricanes. Scroll down the page to a graph of Hurricane Joaquin in 2015. That graph shows that eleven different tools/technologies were used to track windspeed. On the surface, eleven tools seems impressive, maybe even overkill. Why so many tools? Are wind speeds that difficult to accurately measure? Is each tool/technology so poor as a stand alone measurement that multiple tools/technologies are needed? If each is so bad alone, how can eleven lousy tools produce accuracy when combined? The article doesn't address that. Maybe eleven is no better than one; take your pick as to which one. Maybe the government has too much money to spend. (Oops, no maybe there.)

See the eleven acronyms to the right on the graph. Look at the black line showing the estimated speed reported by forecasters. Then look at the array of results projected by the eleven different tools/technologies. What the graph shows me is this: essentially all but two of the tools/technologies reported wind speeds lower than the black line forecast speed. Two of the tools/technologies, AMSU and AC(DVK P->W) most often showed wind speeds exceeding the forecast speed.

In other words, the forecasters used the maximum measured/calculated wind speed from nine of the eleven tools/technologies. Why? Is it an exaggeration? A purposeful one? Or, again, are the individual tools/technologies so inadequate for the job at hand that forecasters use the highest projected wind speed, and still keep their fingers crossed that they are not under forecasting wind speeds? I have many more questions than answers after reading this article, and remain unsettled as to the accuracy of the forecasts.