A tropical cyclone is like a stick floating in a river: Larger weather systems move it along in their swirling flow. Much of that progress is because weather forecasting generally has advanced. The lead time has also grown: A five-day track forecast today is as accurate as a three-day one was in 2001. By the time a storm makes landfall, the difference between its predicted and real locations is less, on average, than 8 miles (and in Laura’s case, much less). In 1990, the average three-day forecast was off by about 300 nautical miles, which is the distance from New Orleans to Houston. The clearest success has come in forecasting the storm track. What’s amazing, says Allison Wing, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University, is how much we do know. Add to that their semi-chaotic nature and tendency to spend their youth in remote stretches of ocean that aren’t routinely crisscrossed by data collectors, and you end up with a tricky phenomenon to understand. Between 19, only 88 made landfall in the United States.
Though 2020 has already seen 26 named storms, including Hurricane Epsilon just this week, hurricanes are rare events. But others think the same scientific dedication that led to the super-accurate forecast for Laura will break through that supposed limit. “The improvements have been really phenomenal,” says Chris Landsea, a hurricane researcher at the NHC.īut are we nearing the limit for how accurate storm track predictions can get? Landsea and a colleague recently asked that question and found some evidence that suggests it may be true.
That bulls-eye was a remarkable demonstration of how much forecasting has leapt forward in the past few decades. It arrived at 1 a.m., just one hour and 3,000 feet away. By the 24th, the center’s three-day forecast predicted that Laura would make landfall at Cameron, Louisiana, at 2 a.m. By the time it got a name, on August 21, forecasters for the National Hurricane Center (NHC) were watching it obsessively, kneading in data from airplanes and models and their own decades of experience to forecast exactly where and how the storm would develop. The first glimmers of the proto-Hurricane Laura showed up on forecasters’ radars on August 16, 2020, a large, loose splattering of clouds rolling off the edge of West Africa.