FOLLOW-UP COMMENTARY BY JIM O'DONNEL

Friday, November 30th marked the official end of the 2007 Hurricane Season and even though we had heavy rain and flooding from Tropical Storm Erin back in August and a somewhat unexpected brush with Hurricane Humberto in September, we managed to weather this season remarkably well.  Ultimately, the vast majority of tropical storms and hurricanes that formed this year remained at sea and had little impact on the United States.  However, the Caribbean countries did not fare as well and three names (Dean, Felix and Noel) will likely be permanently retired due to the loss of life and damage wrought by those storms in Martinique, Jamaica, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and the Bahamas. 

You may recall that at the beginning of the hurricane season in June, I wrote an E-mail commentary critical of the various seasonal hurricane predictions now being issued several times annually by various governmental agencies, meteorological companies and educational institutions.  For the second year in a row, by any standard, these predictions have been way off the mark and overblown...if you'll pardon the pun.  Even worse, when it was fairly obvious as early as August that tropical activity was noticeably subdued, the seemingly endless number of "revised" predictions continued to forecast a well above average season.

It is my belief that these predictions are counterproductive and convey confusing and largely meaningless information to the public.  There is no statistical correlation between the overall numbers of tropical cyclones that form each year and the number of landfalls.  Yet, when high numbers of tropical storms and hurricanes are predicted, there is an automatic implication made and an assumption by most people that the risk of landfalls and severity of storms has also increased when it actually has not.  History has proven that we have an equal chance in any given year of being affected by a tropical storm or hurricane regardless of the overall numbers.  For example, the Texas coast has been struck at least once and, in some cases, multiple times in seasons that ended up average or below average in the number of storms overall.  Conversely, we have also had many above average seasons with no tropical storms or hurricanes at all in Texas.  The same thing is true in other states.

I mentioned that I felt these annual predictions are inadvertently helping to justify coastal insurance rate increases as happened this year with Texas Windstorm premiums.  Some emergency managers and other government officials are also reacting prematurely to distant storms with no imminent threat to their locality such as this summer when Louisiana's governor declared a state of emergency for Hurricane Dean, even though the storm never came within 600 miles of that state making landfall in Mexico.  I believe that the news media (particularly the cable news networks) have contributed to this phenomenon by constantly repeating the doom and gloom seasonal predictions every time a new tropical system developed, thus increasing a sense of fear and anxiety among coastal residents that sooner or later, a storm was coming.

And now it has finally happened.  According to Orlando, Florida's WKGM-TV Local6.com, local hotel mogul Harris Rosen is threatening a lawsuit over the predictions, particularly those of Dr. William Gray and Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University in Fort Collins saying he's had enough of the dire annual outlooks that he says are hurting the tourism business throughout Florida.  I not only believe he may be right but I think that this is probably also occurring to a lesser extent in other coastal communities along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and perhaps in the Caribbean nations and Mexico, as well.  Maybe even right here on Galveston Island?  If Rosen does end up suing and it ends up turning into a class-action case, there is just no telling how many potential business owners may ultimately join as litigants.  Whether it is provable in court or not is another matter entirely.  But if it ever went to trial, I think it would probably spell the end of these annual predictions for good due to the associated legal risks and I think that would be a good thing.  Even if that happens, the predictions could still be formulated and discussed within the scientific community without resorting to alarming the public similar to the way military intelligence information is obtained and processed.   

Let me be clear that I am not against advancements in the field of Meteorology and I strongly support and encourage any and all research efforts that try to improve our understanding of tropical cyclones.  I have spent the better part of the past thirty years doing just that myself.  But, I am against throwing raw  and essentially meaningless numbers out to the public that tend to unnecessarily frighten people and may be discouraging commerce and development along our nation's coastline.  We will always have to live with the risk of tropical storms and hurricanes here in Texas just as Buffalo will always deal with snow, Phoenix with heat and San Francisco with earthquakes.  But we have so many positives that outweigh the negatives of living here and the last thing we need is someone a thousand miles away and a mile above sea level hurting our coastal economy and ultimately raising the cost of living by repeatedly making dire predictions with seemingly no consequences when they turn out to be wrong.

I encourage anyone with a similar or dissenting viewpoint on this issue to e-mail me at IslandWx@aol.com.