Here We Go Again
By urbanhoustonian at June 27, 2010 | 4:17 PM | Print
With another Hurricane Season, it’s time to starting writing new Hurricana posts.
Our first named storm (in the Atlantic) is Alex. I’m going to go ahead and make Alex a guy. Houston hasn’t had great luck with female-named storms starting with Al- (Hurricane Alicia and Tropical Storm Allison, anyone?) in the past. There is, of course, a new wrinkle in this year’s hurricane season, the BP Oil Spill. It’s not clear to me how badly a hurricane in the Gulf would affect the oil spill. One thing for sure, however, is the media is doing their best to cheer on that particular event.
I haven’t read anything to indicate Alex is going to pose a threat to the oil spill area, but you wouldn’t think that was the case watching the national news. Local news outlets are bad enough when hurricane season comes around, it’s 10 times worse when the national media gets involved. I was watching MSNBC this morning, and after they had shown a projection that had Alex going nowhere near the spill, the talking head in the studio mentioned ‘some outlying computer models’ that do indicate Big Al could turn towards the spill, and make landfall near the Texas/Louisiana border.
Of course, this is entirely possible because, let’s face it, the scientific community is much more ignorant about the paths of storms than they are willing to admit. Still, I can’t recall a hurricane going so totally against the grain of a majority of the computer models available. Below is the latest computer model projections from Weather Underground’s Tropical Weather Center.
The GFS model is the one the local media is going to be most interested in. Granted, the models have been trending northward over the past 48 hours, but Mexico remains the betting man’s target for now. I’m not terribly worried for the oil spill or Houston at this point, nor should you. Let’s not allow the media to change that, shall we?
One important thing to remember, I read reports back in the Spring that we were looking at a very hot and dry summer. After the past week, and looking at this week’s forecast, I’d say listening to local media is shaky. Stick with the folks at Weather Underground.
