What is the greatest misconception on the part of the public about hurricane forecasting?
There was a stretch a few years ago where we had some very notable successes. Isabel (2003) for example was a major hurricane that we had a very accurate bead on in terms of its ultimate landfall point several days in advance, and that was the first year we were issuing five-day forecasts. So I think there might have been some complacency that developed that all of the forecasts were going to be that good. And we ended up with Charley (2004), where the track forecast really wasn’t all that far off, yet it surprised a lot of people. People have short memories, and sometimes there is not really an appreciation of the uncertainty in the forecast. Where do you think we are heading in the next five, ten years in regard to accuracy? I think that our track accuracy will continue to improve. The computer models are getting better and better at forecasting what’s going on in the surrounding atmosphere, so I would expect that as our track accuracy improves, you’ll see us looking at things like e
