Despite Wednesday’s winds, which left campus littered with tree branches that had been rattled down from the limbs, and the week’s back-to-back thunderstorm predictions, a team of meteorologists say this year’s hurricane season will bring an average amount of storms to the coast.
“The Atlantic hurricane season for 2009 will be fairly average compared to the past 20 years,” Xie said, “but compared to the past 50 years, the 2009 forecast will be above normal.”
Lian Xie and Danny Modlin, both of whom work in the Department of Marine, Earth and Atmosphere Sciences, and Montserrat Fuentes at the Department of Statistics, have submitted the forecast for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, which starts June 1 and ends Nov. 30.
Xie and his colleagues anticipate that there will be from 11 to 14 named storms, which include hurricanes and tropical storms. Six to eight of those named storms will become hurricanes. There is roughly a 70 percent chance that at least one tropical cyclone will make landfall in the southeastern part of the United States, and there is a 45 percent chance that the storm that hits land will be a hurricane.
Hurricanes that hit land often send smaller, less severe storms westward.
Sean Ehrig, a junior in aerospace engineering who lives near the coast in Maryland, said he has seen such effects.
“We get some bad rain storms that may knock down some trees and take the power down,” he said, “but because of our area, we only get the residual storms.”
Xie’s predictions should carry some weight. During last year’s Olympics, he was a weather forecaster who had to predict wind speed with certain accuracy so that sailers leaving from a Chinese harbor would not be stranded in the middle of the water.
The sailing competition requires 3 m/s winds for duration of two hours, so Xie worked with Sujit Ghosh and Huiping Miao of the Department of Statistics, as well as local weather forecasters, to predict when the weather would be at its prime for the sailing competition. The competition organizers would then use the information to plan out the games and, because of the successful weather forecast, none of the games were cancelled.
Xie said he remembers one day when the competition organizers were anxious because the winds were too calm, so they called him while he and the other forecasters were out at lunch. He told the organizers they shouldn’t worry, suggesting that they postpone the sailing event until later in the afternoon and begin at about 3:30 p.m. At about 3 p.m., the winds started to pick up and the event went as planned. The teams finished at about 6 p.m.
