Hurricane forecasts wrong, and that’s not comforting

HOUSTON – The skies, it turned out, did not fall.

Most tropical storm experts had predicted that this year’s Atlantic hurricane season would be deadly. Instead, with just a few days remaining in the June-November hurricane prime time, 2006 has turned out to be a dud.

Not that anyone living along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts is complaining about the errant forecast, after a vicious 2005 hurricane season that spawned Katrina, Rita and other killer storms.

But inside the small, elite fraternity of hurricane forecasters, there is soul-searching over how they got things so wrong – and concern that their Chicken Little mistake could add to public complacency when next year’s hurricane season gets under way.

Back in May, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted there would be 13 to 16 named tropical storms this year, eight to 10 of which would become hurricanes and four to six of which would be “major,” or Category 3, 4 or 5. Meanwhile, a second group of hurricane experts at Colorado State University predicted 17 named storms, nine of which would become hurricanes and five of which would be major.

In fact, this year there have been just nine named storms, only five of which became hurricanes and only two of which were intense – and none of them hit the U.S. mainland as hurricanes. And there’s nothing more on the horizon between now and Nov. 30, when the 2006 hurricane season will formally close.

That means the hurricane experts, who pride themselves on their sophisticated computer models and state-of-the-art forecasting tools, were less accurate than even the average TV weather forecaster on the 10 p.m. news.

“It does make us a little more humble in trying to figure out what’s going to happen in the future,” said Chris Landsea, a member of the federal hurricane forecast team.

The biggest mistake forecasters made this year was failing to predict the onset of an El Nino weather pattern during the summer. El Nino, a periodic warm-water trend in the Pacific Ocean, almost always suppresses hurricane activity in the Atlantic by creating more crosswinds in the upper atmosphere that tear tropical storms apart before they can become hurricanes.

Experts said other factors impeded the formation of hurricanes as well, including large dust storms off of West Africa and a strong sinking of warm air over the Caribbean, which inhibited the formation of thunderstorms that could have evolved into tropical storms.

All those unforeseen factors sent hurricane forecasters back to refine their computer models in the hope that they won’t be caught off guard next year.

“Obviously we’re not thrilled that our forecast turned out wrong, but you try to learn from what happened,” said Phil Klotzbach, the lead forecaster at the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project. “It’s like, hey, there were 18 ESPN baseball experts and none of them picked the Tigers or the Cardinals in the World Series this year. It’s just the nature of the business.”

The experts warn, however, that this year’s unexpectedly mild hurricane season does not alter a larger reality: The Atlantic and Gulf coasts are less than midway through a recurring 30-year cycle of stronger, more frequent tropical storms. That means that the record 2005 hurricane season, with 27 named storms, 15 of which became hurricanes and seven of which were intense, was much closer to the new norm than this year.

Meanwhile, the scorecards for next year will soon be drawn up. The Colorado State team will issue its first forecast for the 2007 hurricane season in early December.