Some weather anomalies

I got alarmed a number of days ago when I looked at the Global Forecasting System (GFS) model runs. This weather prediction run goes the farthest of any of them, 16 days, but is not notoriously accurate past about day 7. I was surprised by what I saw. It clearly showed a storm now over Sierra Leone, Africa, moving off the African coast, moving and strengthening across the Atlantic ocean, riding up Puerto Rico to the Bahamas, then crashing into Myrtle Beach, heading to Charlotte, then hooking to the right towards Richmond, on 2004 July 21, Wednesday evening. It then hooks back to the left and hits Washington, DC. In other words, it calls for a hurricane to strike the US East Coast two weeks from now, and I figured it would be called Alex.

I thought, maybe this was a fluke of this run of the GFS. After all, this is two weeks away, and the next run of the model may show something different. So I looked at the 12Z run, one run before this one. That one shows Alex heading straight up the peninsula of Florida, then whipping around to hit Charlotte, finally exiting to sea somewhere near the Outer Banks. So there may be some reality to this one. I looked back one more, and there it nicked the Florida keys and hit Louisiana. The one before that had it turning north out to sea long before it approaches the mainland. Each run seems to get worse as far as the East Coast was concerned.

I am going to SUUSI that week, and so I got concerned that Alex (or Bonnie; a storm is developing southeast of Bermuda) would either strike SUUSI or strike my home.So I looked at subsequent runs. One of these showed it missing the coast and going out to sea, but the last two runs don't show any hurricane much at all; what there is peters out over the open waters of the Atlantic and don't show much motion at all. So much for this storm.

In fact, the weather is going to be great the next few days in central Virginia. Here a local TV station, WWBT-TV, Channel 12, predicts that there will be a chance of storms each day, and showed a 7-day pictorial forecast with a rain symbol on each day of the week. However, the official NOAA forecast, as seen for example on Weather Underground, does not show any rain at all. In fact, after two days, it gets monotonous in predicting partly cloudy with high of 90 and low of 70 each day. One or the other of these two contradictory forecasts is right and one is wrong. We will see the next few days which it is.

Goes to show that weather sometimes plays a fickle tune.