Many of you have heard of Dr. William Gray from Colorado State University.  He’s the renowned hurricane forecaster who helps put out a forecast for the upcoming hurricane seasons.  Our Meteorologist Mace Michaels interviewed Dr. Gray at the recent Hurricane Conference.  I found some of what Dr. Gray had to say very interesting regarding the accuracy of his seasonal predictions.  Here are a few quotes from the man himself.

“I started out 25 years ago trying to ask the question say three, six, nine months before the season…there ought to be something in the atmosphere or in the ocean that has some precursor sense of what the season will be…THERE ARE!  There are in a statistical sense, and we’ve looked at it all.  I’ve had great strides with students and other associates, and we’ve learned a lot.  We’ve made some errors; we’ve learned a lot, but we’re working on it.”

“It’s a challenge. I think it’s a great scientific challenge.  Can you really say what’s gonna happen, and I think we ought to keep working on it. We are learning a lot.  Now when you bust…you learn more than when you verify. “

“Yeah, we can’t say for sure, but we can say something, and if you keep going with us every year, we’ll be right 7 or 8 out of 10 years...going the right way. We often miss the numbers, but if it’s an above average year, we typically get that, and if it’s a below average we typically get that.”

Finally…

“We would never put a forecast out if we didn’t have good “hindcast” skills. We develop this scheme and apply it to past years, and if it works on past years, then we use it, but that’s why it takes a lot of years.  Even though we have 60 years of good hindcast data…that’s not enough.  That atmosphere beats on a multi-century or longer basis and there’s always some characteristics of how the atmosphere functions that we don’t have in that hindcast period, so when that rears its head, we’re not going to do so well. ”

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