ANOTHER Fall, 2012 Atlantic Coast storm coming?

[cpzilliacus]

Washington Post: Coastal storm may develop Thanksgiving week

For the third time in less than a month, a coastal storm may affect the Mid-Atlantic. This time a storm may brew in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.

Computer models have been fairly consistent over the last two days in developing low pressure off the coast of the Carolinas Sunday or Monday. As always, exactly where the storm forms, where it tracks, and how strong it gets will determine its exact impacts. There's also a chance a storm doesn't form or tracks harmlessly out to sea.

[NE2]

This dog is sure biting a lot of men.

[WillWeaverRVA]

I think someone is off in GFS model fantasyland again. In any case most weather models tend not to be reliable at that range. The only one that really is at all, the ECMWF model, has a rather weak low pretty far off the coast.

Between things like this and the Weather Channel naming winter storms (utterly ridiculous names, to boot), there's just too much fearmongering going on.

[Alps]

"There might be a storm, or not, and it may go out to sea, or not, and it may be strong, or not." Sounds like all weather predictions nowadays

[cpzilliacus]

"There might be a storm, or not, and it may go out to sea, or not, and it may be strong, or not." Sounds like all weather predictions nowadays

Agreed.  Though the warnings in advance of Sandy turned out to be pretty accurate, unfortunately.

[empirestate]

Between things like this and the Weather Channel naming winter storms (utterly ridiculous names, to boot), there's just too much fearmongering going on.

Agreed about the silly names, but would you indeed classify the recent round of weather forecasting as fearmongering? Both Sandy and the following week's storm behaved almost exactly as they were predicted to; if anything, the effects of both were slightly more intense than warned. Irene last year also behaved with uncanny predictability; however, it suffered a bit of a fizzle at landfall in terms of intensity. Hurricane Katrina had precisely the suite of devastating effects that such a system was predicted to have, and it itself was warned to be such a system.

I suppose it depends which channel you watch, and I've definitely seen some quite overzealous forecasting in the past, but the weather reports I've seen over the past month or so have seemed almost surprisingly candid and accurate.

Now, if by "fearmongering" you refer to the current and recent outpouring of political dismay, then I'm right there with you!

[vdeane]

Depends on area.  Up here in Potsdam, the universities were acting like the sky was falling, yet aside from some strange cloud movements on the radar, it was a normal day.  Someone should have told them that hurricanes tend to disperse when they hit land, and also that forecasts had the storm spending a lot of time on land before reaching here.

[WillWeaverRVA]

Between things like this and the Weather Channel naming winter storms (utterly ridiculous names, to boot), there's just too much fearmongering going on.

Agreed about the silly names, but would you indeed classify the recent round of weather forecasting as fearmongering? Both Sandy and the following week's storm behaved almost exactly as they were predicted to; if anything, the effects of both were slightly more intense than warned. Irene last year also behaved with uncanny predictability; however, it suffered a bit of a fizzle at landfall in terms of intensity. Hurricane Katrina had precisely the suite of devastating effects that such a system was predicted to have, and it itself was warned to be such a system.

I suppose it depends which channel you watch, and I've definitely seen some quite overzealous forecasting in the past, but the weather reports I've seen over the past month or so have seemed almost surprisingly candid and accurate.

Now, if by "fearmongering" you refer to the current and recent outpouring of political dismay, then I'm right there with you!

Well, the ECMWF model and a few others nailed Sandy, but the GFS model (used frequently by many local news media since it's not...uh, European) kept sending Sandy out to sea. The GFS model had a very severe winter storm moving up the coast and affecting many of the same areas that Sandy did, but the storm never materialized; just as the ECMWF model had predicted, it is currently moving far out to sea, and it hasn't really affected land much other than some cloudiness and some slightly increased wave heights.

When I say "fearmongering" I refer to the sudden onslaught of headlines reading something like "Another big storm coming to Sandy-ravaged areas?"

[vdeane]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/weather