End of the season, end of an era, a new season begins

The Northern Hemisphere hurricane season has ended as of November 30th. It was a strange season, active start, quiet middle, and pretty active towards the end, but certainly not the catastrophic season some of the more enthusiastic practitioners were predicting in June. That’s not to be dismissive of the bad landfalls in the US, Mexico, especially Helene here in the southeastern US, and of course the huge rain dump by Debby in GA/SC. Here is a link to the NOAA season wrap up (link).

The forecasts from NHC were pretty good this year. People who stuck to their forecasts were well prepared. Contrary to the assertions of certain DOGEy individuals, private forecasts are not statistically better than the National Weather Service, and while some providers do provide added value, all of them depend on the infrastructure of NWS and our international partners. Privatization and commercialization of weather data has been tried in the past both here and in other countries; it doesn’t save money, and results in a worse product. The best system is the one we have, where the core data collection and dissemination is run by government, and the private sector adds value and specialization where needed. Expect a battle over this, a repeat of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the system will be screwed up for a decade until we return to what works. Sigh.

Unfortunately, this year it seemed like there was a lot more bad information going around than usual, everything from the usual media fear-mongering to outright fake graphics being circulated. I spent way too much time this year trying to debunk the garbage going around.

This year was a bit weird for me personally, as it was a backdrop to some significant business changes. As of October my long running relationship with Kinetic Analysis Corporation (a company I co-founded) ended. The close of that contract ends a saga that has lasted 30 years, and has triggered a lot of infrastructure changes.

I’ve spent most of the last month shutting down my extensive computing cluster (fifteen 48 core Xeon computers, each with two NVIDIA A100 GPUs). I’m keeping my GOES ground station operational for now …

I’m also trying to figure out the minimum infrastructure needed to continue doing some hurricane and earthquake hazard modeling as a supporting element for my geopolitical work. I’ll at least continue to monitor the major global weather models to try to figure out when to cover or bring in the plants. Tonight will be such a night, forecast lows in midtown Savannah are 28 F for Friday night/Saturday morning.

One thing to remember (but not count on) is that often the forecasts for low temperatures are at airports, which tend to be located outside or on the fringes of cities. Urban areas create heat islands from all the waste heat from buildings, machinery, and thermal inertia from concrete, etc. So typically they are warmer than their surroundings.

Remember you can get detailed no-drama, blipvert free point forecasts from your National Weather Services’ local forecast offices. These take in to account local variations to a greater extent than the canned forecasts you usually see in the media or some apps. Here is the direct link for Frogmore, and here is the link for Midtown Savannah. You can zoom in and out on these maps and click to get the forecast at other locations, and can get hour-by-hour graphs like this one for tonight where you can see it going below freezing around 11pm, and warming up by 8am Saturday morning:

Do you need to drip your pipes? In Savannah, probably not … here is some advice from Homes and Garden (link). And an obligatory video:

Nicholas was rather angry about the loss of the cluster. He appreciates the fact the office is a LOT quieter without the computer fans whining, but his favorite place to hang out in cold weather was on top of the fiber optic router that stayed really warm all the time. But not to worry, I got him a heated bed for his favorite chair:

My work is now concentrated in the area of geopolitical analysis – which as you might guess from the news is pretty busy – but doesn’t have long working days like natural hazards, and I’m not going to post publicly about that very often because the environment is just too toxic. So I hope to take more time off, perhaps even make the pilgrimage to Frogmore. As for the blog, I’ll continue to post here from time to time if something interesting comes up over the winter like a snowflake shutting down Atlanta or any serious winter storms. Am talking to a few people about how to get enough support to keep the blog going through next hurricane season, so stay tuned.

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