Warm Again in Florida!!

[Steve H.]

Out for my noon time run and worked up a good sweat in Palm Bay FL today. Temps had to be in the low 70's, which is much better than the 50's we had for highs on Monday. Longest run of cold weather I can remember down here. IMO colder period than '89, when we lost all the Australian pines. Very weird that forecasters around the country are having extreme difficulty getting their forecasts right the past few weeks, particularly in the east. Models have been atrocious in getting any run-to-run consistency, or even getting agreement in solutions with other models. Storms have evaporated from medium range models. to show up again in various forms in other models just before an event and still fail to nail down forecasts. Must be driving forecasters nutz! I'm thinkin' that when they adjusted several models to correct biases (e.g, AVN/(GFS)) they may have introduced more errors than they figured on. I know that when you start patching S/W builds to fix errors you can ultimately introduce new ones. This is OK if you're talking about a patch to fix say - Windows '98, but some of these models have extremely complex algorithms that, if you don't know what the originators intent was when they were written/formulated you can really hose things up. The AVN of old had it's biases, but they were pretty well understood....a known quantity. Now I wonder if they know what they have!! Just speculation, and maybe it's just that the pattern is very volatile right now, and not that the models have gone Tango Uniform :o . Anyhow, I still believe the east coast is gonna see a blockbuster event before the winter is out, and Florida is gonna go in the ice box once again But as we get into February, the cold shots shouldn't last as long. Hey, and the setup for Hurricane season 2003 is setting up to be an interesting one. With El Nino on the wane, and a cold winter, the heat should come back with a vengeance this summer. We'll see how the models handle the Tropics. Cheers!! 8)