Every year, the coming of warmer weather in the spring brings with it the scientific parlor game of predicting how many storms the impending Atlantic hurricane season will bring. But could meteorological prognosticators soon begin to predict storms years in advance, and not just months, with some accuracy? It is possible, a team led by Doug Smith of the U.K.'s Met Office says. In a study in Nature Geoscience, Smith essentially modeled the climate of past to see if the team's system accurately predicted the Atlantic hurricane season.
The researchers used nine versions of its decadal prediction model to “hindcast” Atlantic hurricanes each year from 1960 to 2007. The model was set to May 1 for each of those years and then was asked how many storms would come that season. Averaging across the nine versions, the model results closely matched the changing number of hurricanes that occurred over those ...
