Gamma`s Last Gasp

UPDATE: Always the jokester, Carl is now marketing his new Model Spray for 2006 use.

This morning Dennis The Programmer (not Dennis The Bounty Hunter from SpongeBob though DTP does ride a motorcycle occasionally) sent me this image.

It was the last "model spray"* for Tropical Depression Gamma, just before it was "de-declared" by the government.

*I credit Carl with inventing this term, as it appears only 500 times on Google versus the more palatable "model spread" (come to think of it, that's no more palatable) which appears 12,600 times.

In any case, you can see that the models seem to have no clue where Gamma is going. Even though models are known to differ from one another, this seems really rash. The root of the problem -- a very weak system (hence the de-declaration).

Computer forecast models rarely handle weak systems the same, while they generally agree on very strong systems. It's like placing a small leaf in a stream, versus a big, heavy toy boat -- you can guess where the heavier, more powerful boat will go much more readily than the leaf.

I remember forecasting for the University in when the Blizzard of 1993 (stats & maps here) appeared on the models -- and the scary thing was, they all had it, in approximately the same place, taking the same track.

Of course, we only had 2 models back then :)