Advisories?

[swmochic]

Before you write the advisories for the storms, what material are you given so that you can make the final decision as to where the NHC storm track will be. Do you have special guidelines or can you as the specialist, use your own judgement to where it will be? I Don't understand all the technical terms you use and for the most part I am generally lost!

[jfranklin]

Before you write the advisories for the storms, what material are you given so that you can make the final decision as to where the NHC storm track will be. Do you have special guidelines or can you as the specialist, use your own judgement to where it will be? I Don't understand all the technical terms you use and for the most part I am generally lost!

Well, we have a great deal of guidance to assist us in determining the official forecast. With track particularly, the numerical models have made tremendous strides over the past 10-15 years. The numerical guidance is not as good for intensity, and raw intuition plays more of a role.

I could go on at great length about the forecast process, but just to answer the basic question, it consists of evaluating the present state of the atmosphere, considering what environmental features are going to be important, evaluating the model guidance and trying to reconcile the differences between the models. This, primarily, is where the human judgement comes in.

There are no special guidelines, but given how the track guidance tends to perform, we would need a pretty good reason to diverge significantly from it. There certainly are cases where the whole of the guidance is just wrong (Mitch's southward motion is a particularly devastating example of this), but I don't know of anyone who can consistently out-compute today's track models.

James