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Hurricane Outlook
Fri May 16, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and this is The Weather Notebook. Does it seem odd to you that the most
noted seasonal predictions for hurricanes come from ... Colorado? Well, it's all because of
William Gray.
Dr. Gray leads a group called the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University.
Back in the early 1980s, this group created a long-range hurricane outlook. They didn't try
to forecast individual storms. Instead, they looked at things like sea-surface temperature,
rainfall in Africa, and high-level winds above the tropics. These factors take a long time to
change, but they affect how many hurricanes will form and how strong they might get. Gray and
his colleagues developed a complicated equation that takes in all these variables and spits
out a forecast.
That's still how it works, except the equation now include far more data, and each forecast is
front-page news. In fact, some of Gray's former colleagues are now at NOAA, where they help
issue the government's own outlook. What's the word from Colorado this year? If you're a
hurricane fan, and we don't mean the Miami football team, you'll like what you hear. As of
this month, the Colorado State team is calling for 12 named storms, including eight
hurricanes. That's about twice as many hurricanes as the Atlantic got last year. Gray will
update this forecast at the end of May and then twice more during the hurricane season. Last
year the numbers dropped with each update, but this year, if anything, the numbers may go even
higher, thanks to some incredibly warm water off Florida.
Thanks to Bob Henson for today's story. The Weather Notebook is funded by Subaru of America
and the National Science Foundation. Special funding comes from Davis instruments, on the web
at www.davisnet.com.
Today's Links
The Tropical Meteorology Project
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/
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