Hurricane Season Is Approaching Quickly
With the start of the hurricane season just over two weeks away, there have been at least three recent conferences to discuss the probabilities for the season, and to prepare first responders and emergency officials.
Florida held its National Hurricane Conference in Ft. Lauderdale this week, featuring presentations from Governor Bush and National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield. The governor urged Floridians to stock 72 hours worth of emergency supplies, while Mayfield tried to convince the 4000 attendees that while 2005 was bad, 2006 could be worse. He also pointed out that while predicting the exact path and intensity of a storm has improved over time, it’s still not an exact science.
For that reason, the hurricane center is going to change its forecast maps from showing a line representing the possible storm track to one that shows probabilities of a storm striking a specific area.
In New York City, officials held a hurricane conference this week to discuss the possibilities of a storm striking the Big Apple. Some forecasters think that a strike on the Northeast US is overdue, given the predicted intensity of the storm season, and the fact that the last major storm to hit the area was Gloria, way back in 1985. For a city filled with skyscrapers and millions of residents, even a category 2 storm could be disastrous.
Finally a group of forecasters met in Houston to discuss the upcoming season, including Drs. William Gray and Phillip Klotzbach of the University of Colorado, who are perhaps two of the most famous hurricane experts (just Google [dr gray] and you’ll get the University of Colorado website). They repeated their forecast of 7 named storms and 9 hurricanes for the 2006 season, and a 64% chance of a storm making landfall on the East coast.
Just for the record, here are the storm names that will be used for the 2006 season:
Alberto, Beryl, Chris, Debby, Ernesto, Florence, Gordon, Helene, Isaac, Joyce, Kirk, Leslie, Michael, Nadine, Oscar, Patty, Rafael, Sandy, Tony, Valerie, and William.
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