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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHurricane Joaquin Forecast: Why U.S. Weather Model Has Fallen Behind
For days, the models that guide the National Hurricane Centers forecasts had been split over the future of Hurricane Joaquin.
Different models were sending the storm to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina or to Maine or to Bermuda. The official forecast which held that the storm would make landfall in the mid-Atlantic was low confidence, as the center put it. It was an attempt to compromise between models that fundamentally disagreed.
Friday, the official forecast now takes Joaquin out to sea. A direct hit on the East Coast cant yet be ruled out, but the top models doubt it.
If this forecast holds, Hurricane Joaquin will yield one clear winner: the model from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts or simply, the European model which consistently forecast that Joaquin would head off to sea.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/upshot/hurricane-joaquin-forecast-european-model-leads-pack-again.html?_r=1
enough
(13,235 posts)But I'd like to point out that I've been following my usual local NOAA forecast carefully, and it never showed any likelihood at all that we would be in the path of the storm or any serious repercussions of it. I live in Chester County PA, near wilmington DE, which would have been severely impacted in some of the forecasts. But locally, NOAA did not at any point forecast that we would experience anything beyond rain.
It was actually a rather bizarre experience to be reading all these dire forecasts on the media, then go to the NOAA site and see nothing particularly unusual in the forecast for our area many days out.
1939
(1,683 posts)The storm was caught between two opposing high pressure systems. It spent a long time dancing around just east of the Bahamas before it made its decisive turn. There is still one model showing a 90 degree left turn right into North Carolina. Sometimes the European model is a winner and sometimes one of the other models is a winner. When all of the models give very scattered tracks, you know the storm and the steering conditions are unusual.