Hurricane Forecast, Bastardi Extras, NE SST

Our official 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Landfall Forecast is now online (and is archived below). I attended Joe Bastardi's presentation last week for the AccuWeather meteorologists, which was a preview of the talk that Joe is giving today in Houston at our annual Hurricane Conference. It is always very interesting to watch the wheels turning in Joe's head. He truly believes that we have found, and will continue to find, patterns in the historical hurricane activity and the upcoming season's weather patterns that will make for more and more accurate seasonal landfall forecasts as we move forward in time.

A couple of interesting notes from the talk (these are paraphrasing of Joe's words):

- Joe believes we are in the "Landfall Pulse" (a 3-4 year cycle of storm impacts once you're in a "Maturing Warm" AMO)
- The weather in May may be a harbinger of Hurricane Season - in 1996 (one of the analog years) we had a Negative AO as we do this year
- La Nina is fading, going to neutral
- 2008 was the lowest tropical activity worldwide
- He thinks that there are relationships between the placement of the negative and positive 500mb August-September anomalies each year, and where the hurricanes are "bunched"
- He now believes that Philadelphia is the biggest threat in the Northeast because of the shape of the bay
- He commented about the above-normal SST (sea-surface temperatures) off the Northeast coast, which he finds interesting (as do I) but he didn't go into it.

More on those last two comments...

NORTHEAST SST ANOMALIES: I investigated this a little more... as of late April, the waters off the New Jersey coast held the highest sea-surface temperature anomaly (difference compared to normal) in the entire North American continent's waters. As of this week, the anomaly has been reduced considerably. Below are snapshots of the temperature anomalies from the past three weeks. Note that the first one was "off the charts" as they say.

THE PHILADELPHIA HURRICANE: Joe believes that a storm will strike the Northeast in the next 10 years, he has been saying that for the last several years. Although in 2005 he talked about the impact on Rhode Island and New York City, this year he is talking about Philadelphia. If a storm took the nightmare track shown below, the storm surge would be forced into the bay and funneled up the Delaware Bay and up the Delaware River, causing massive flooding (remember that Isabel caused a storm surge far inland that was measured in feet). Damming in New York may have made the problem worse; read JB's entire diatribe here.

Should the original link above disappear, here is the final version for archival purposes: