Irene Forecasters Missed Storm’s Intensity While Correctly Predicting Path

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Bloomberg:

Weather forecasters accurately predicted the direction and timing of Hurricane Irene’s path of destruction up the U.S. East Coast even as they overestimated the storm’s strength.

“This was one of their better forecasts,” Hans Graber, a professor of marine physics at the University of Miami, said in a telephone interview. “Definitely, it helped to save lives.”

Irene, which has weakened to a tropical storm, was responsible for at least 18 deaths in the U.S. Still, it was a shadow of what roared across the Caribbean last week with winds of up to 120 miles (194 kilometers) an hour and hit North Carolina’s Outer Banks as a Category 1 hurricane. It was dropped to its current status before making landfall in New York City at about 9 a.m. today.

“We’re still not where we want to be on intensity,” Ken Clark, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather Inc., said in a telephone interview.

Irene may cost insurers as much as $3 billion to cover U.S. damage, with overall economic losses of $7 billion, according to Kinetic Analysis Corp., which predicts disaster impact. The U.S. suffered $35 billion in losses in nine separate events so far in 2011, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tying a record for disasters causing more than $1 billion damage in a single year.
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The non-disaster of the year?

[Pepper]

"Weather forecasters accurately predicted the direction and timing of Hurricane Irene’s path of destruction up the U.S. East Coast even as they overestimated the storm’s strength." == Bloomger

 

WestVirginiaRebel! That may depend upon when they started measuring their accuracy. Initially it was going to go over Florida.

 

Michelle Malkin fell for the hype.

 

She posted a photo that does not belong to Irene