Beware the "I" storm

And… we’re back!

Iceland was incredible. Scotland was superb. It did finally rain a little on our final full day, but the sun saw us off Sunday. Such luck. If you’re yearning for lots of blue-sky filled photos, see: Reykjavik, Grindavik area, Glasgow, Fort William, Inverness, Loch Ness area and Edinburgh.

Weather watch

Active Atlantic. Humberto remained a Category 4 hurricane early Monday on track to deliver Bermuda a glancing but powerful blow, especially when it comes to beach conditions. Imelda is getting its act together over the Bahamas as it shifts slowly north, eventually also hooking Bermuda’s way. Dangerous surf in the U.S. will focus on the Florida and Georgia coastlines Monday with those conditions increasingly shifting north along the East Coast thereafter.

Another Category 5. Humberto went nutty Saturday, reaching 160 mph, making it an ultra-rare second Category 5 of the season. It’s the 44th on record in the Atlantic, something Dennis Mersereau wrote is four percent of all hurricanes there. It’s a good time to reshare my front-page Washington Post article (sans paywall) from late August on Category 5 Erin and whether or not these storms are becoming more frequent. (tl;dr: they are). Some other items include a satellite loop and the advisory archive.

Lightning links

Big pattern change to usher cooler air, needed rain into the Northwest. (Renee Duff, AccuWeather)

2025 Hurricane Season Tracks Show How Lucky We've Been — So Far. (Jonathan Erdman, The Weather Channel)

Side commentary: Seasons often end up with favored zones. Getting to October with a map like this seems to bode well for the increasingly FEMAless U.S. Of course, late season can brew up huge problems in the Caribbean and the Gulf.

Final surge of monsoon moisture triggers flooding in Phoenix, near Las Vegas. (Andrew Wulfeck, FOX Weather)

Beware the “I” storm … for various reasons

The early Imelda forecasts were bad. Or the run — by far too many — to forecast in any detail for what was an underdeveloped patch of showers was bad.

Could it be the “I” storm curse? They tend to be baddies (says a guy with a hurricane in his name now retired for wrecking Florida). Peak season problems.

Watching from Scotland — I know, I know — there were some scary forecasts and talk of Fujiwhara dances filling my social feeds. A light — I promise — perusal of broader weather news around that time showed the same.

(Not to pick on CNN, a leader in excellent weather coverage — they were far from alone — but they offer a quick and easy example, shown below).

There was a lot to talk about and not a lot of time. Why waste a juicy storm threat in a previously quiet September.

There’s the aforementioned Fujiwhara effect, where storms can wobble around and entrance each other. In this case, what proved to be mostly model-land jargon. Sure, Humberto may have assisted in Imelda’s apparent clean miss of the East Coast.

Of arguably greater importance, there was also the potentially critical risk to the coastal Southeast:

“… unlike Humberto, this one could go on to make a direct impact and leave little time to prepare,“ CNN wrote on Friday.

Indeed, the National Hurricane Center was somewhat perturbed at that point, but mostly regarding the potential of heavy rain and a subsequent risk of flooding. There were some models printing out what could have been historic totals. Those solutions now look more like numerical fantasy.

While some forecasts suggested the potential for more in the way of a full-fledged hurricane, it was all super murky at best. And for at least one leading reason.

There is a typically golden rule among storm watchers not to take weather models for too much on a tropical troublemaker before it has a cogent something to track. At the point it was first getting a ton of attention, future Imelda was struggling mightily to even attain a “potential tropical cyclone 9” label (less than a pre-storm depression).

Numerous caution flags should have guided the way.

Instead, the narrative moved from the extremes of another imminent climate-change fueled disaster to oops it’s tracking way east now. All over comically short order.

Does it matter? I don’t know. I am less inclined to believe it has lasting effect on public consciousness than I was in the past. Still, far from ideal from what is a scientific and relatively conservative (not politically in this context) enterprise.

We are also right around the one-year anniversary of Helene, a storm that trashed and traumatized North Carolina among others. Still fresh and painful.

I will grant that this is a comparatively difficult situation given proximity. People cannot be fully faulted on delivering an early heads up. History, including plenty of recent examples, tells us that an incipient storm not far from home can cause massive problems.

But this was not really that — models were, as a whole, not envisioning a superstorm. Even if they were, we should try to remember and follow our own advice more closely. Tossing it when inconvenient implies uselessness on the grand scale.

About

Weekday morning newsletter by a journalist/forecaster. Connecting weather and climate change dots while occasionally stirring the pot.

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