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Hurricane Season
Mon May 16, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
The Hurricane Season, surging up on The Weather Notebook.
If you’re trying to reason with the hurricane season, you are certainly not alone. It is a battle that NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami, continuously fights. Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.
Max Mayfield is Director of the Tropical Prediction Center, parent of the Hurricane Center, whose 2005 Hurricane predictions come out today, the first day of Hurricane Preparedness Week. He says that “where” is more important than “how many.”
No matter what the numbers turn out to be, we always like to emphasize that it just takes about one hurricane over your community to make for a bad year. We’ve got better observations now, the computer models are more sophisticated. We’re able to make a much improved track forecast over what we did even a few years ago. The intensity forecasting is a different story.
Why is intensity so difficult to nail down?
The atmosphere is just so complex and we really need to do a lot better job of observing what goes on in the core of the hurricane in three dimensions and then get that data into higher resolution and computer models.
Mayfield says that data will still come from airplanes flying into the hurricane’s core.
Of all the tropical storms and hurricanes that hit the United States, only about 20% of those are Major Hurricanes. Category 3,4 and 5 on our Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. Yet that 20% causes over 80% of the damage. Most Major Hurricanes become Major Hurricanes by going through some rapid intensification cycle that we simply don’t understand. So, we’re really focusing on that, but again, we have a long way to go.
We will hear more from Max Mayfield as the Hurricane Season progresses. For a weblink to the Tropical Prediction Center, go to our website: www.weathernotebook.org. Our show is funded by Subaru of America.
Tropical Prediction Center Link: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
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