![]() In some ways people are spoiled because the average track error in hurricane forecasts have gotten so much better. “A lot of what we notice in the public is when there are big misses and those big misses affect people in populated areas,” Tang said in an interview.Īlthough this is technically not a miss, people who evacuated Tampa may think it is because the Fort Myers area got the brunt of the storm. But because Tampa was north of the nasty right-side of the hurricane eye, it was spared the biggest storm surge and rainfall. For a large storm, that’s not a big difference and is within the 100-mile (161-kilometer) error bar NOAA sets. The storm made landfall 89 miles (143 kilometers) to the south in Cayo Costa. Tampa - with lots of people and land vulnerable to gigantic storm surges - seemed to be the center of possible landfalls, or even worse just south of the eye so it would get the biggest surge.Īlthough people’s fears focused on Tampa, Ian didn’t. Trying to avoid what meteorologists call the dreaded “windshield wiper effect” of dramatic hurricane path shifts, the official NOAA forecast stayed somewhere in between. The normally reliable American computer model, which had performed better than any other model in 2021 and was doing well earlier in the year, kept forecasting a Florida Panhandle landfall while the European model - long a favorite of many meteorologists - and the British simulation were pointing to Tampa or farther south. Puerto Rico extends power contract amid outages, objections ![]() Ian’s eventual southwestern Florida landfall was always within the “cone of uncertainty” of the National Hurricane Center’s forecast track, although at times it was on the farthest edge. ![]() Still, meteorologists didn’t miss overall with their official Hurricane Ian forecast. “It’s pretty clear that error is very consequential,” said former NOAA chief scientist Ryan Maue, now a private meteorologist who wasn’t part of NOAA’s postmortem. The major American computer forecast model - one of several used by forecasters - missed that and the error was “critical,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration postmortem of computer forecast models determined Thursday. That weakening would allow Ian to turn eastward to Southwest Florida instead of north and west to the Panhandle hundreds of miles away. Much of the forecasting variation seems to be rooted in cool Canadian air that had weakened a batch of sunny weather over the East Coast. But government meteorologists are now figuring out what went wrong - and right. As Hurricane Ian bore down on Florida, normally reliable computer forecast models couldn’t agree on where the killer storm would land.
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