A Grave Disappointment
Well, that is a lot of excitement before a bust. Here is the track forecast for Hurricane Joaquin from two days ago:
Here is this morning’s version:
What a disappointment. We were teased with the prospect of a hurricane running straight up Chesapeake Bay. Now we aren’t even going to get landfall. I have read learned discussions about why. (Notice how it has not only changed direction, but has slowed down. The earlier projection had it as a weaker storm moving faster, and being pushed toward the short by a high pressure system. Instead it has slowed down and strengthened enough that no measly high pressure system can push it around.) I get that forecasting hurricanes is really hard. But still, one to three inches of rain and 50 mph winds aren’t going to give the kids a day home from school.
For those of you in California, Wikipedia has a lengthy article explaining what “rain” is.
For those of you in California, Wikipedia has a lengthy article explaining what “rain” is.
Ouch!Report
The B side of Paperback Writer.Report
We’ve had some of this mysterious “rain” lately. You people have to deal with this all the time? How sad for you.Report
For those curious as to why the forecast was wrong, here is a nice interview on NPR about the difficulties of modeling such things.Report
We had rain in the Bay Area just yesterday. I hope this begins a trend. We know nothing of hurricanes and little of thunderstorms-but we have something known as the Pineapple Express. And then there’s this El Nino thing.Report
Pshaw, we just had Hurricane Dolores blow by not two weeks ago. It sent storms all across the Southland. Got my car all dirty. Best of all, the heavy winds missed land completely so it was really just rain.
But if you all out there on the Eastern Seaboard have some way of sending your excess rain our way, yes it’d be quite welcome here. In fact, what we’d really like, come wintertime, is some of that snow y’all are constantly complaining about. You can put as much of it as you want right up there in the Sierras and we’ll send you all some nice avocados in return.Report
All of South Carolina is going to get walloped by the storm that’s steering Joq out to sea, over a foot in rain in some places. The coastal communities between Ocean City, MD and Jax, FL are seeing beach erosion and flooding.
The hurricane staying offshore (cept Bahamas and Bermuda) is still going to lead to a ruined weekend for many.Report
One of the three major models always had it going out to sea (not the Euro Model, ha ha! Cheese eaters!), so no one should be tooooooooo disappointed here. I’m sure there are times when the models are all roughly aligned and they still get confounded.Report