WeatherGuesser wrote:ozonepete wrote:WPB, it's not splitting of hairs. It's called science, which uses exact numbers. For example, the freezing point of water is exactly 32F, not about, or roughly, 32F. This applies to scales of measured amounts as well. Otherwise you have confusion and vagueness which is not good in science. So when the NHC declares that the maximum winds in a hurricane were 156 mph, ...
Freezing and boiling points of items are expressed as 'exact' because they have been measured with calibrated instruments and verified repeatedly.
Wind speeds are estimates. If they sample and 'declare' a speed in this or any system at 156, it is very likely that speed was somewhere between 150 and 160 and no one will ever be able to state exactly. They have to pick a number for the documents.
I'm well aware of the difference; that's why I said "when the NHC declares", meaning the NHC has to ascertain the most reliable value and stick with it. But the final value is accepted as the measurement. And wind speeds are not always estimates. They are often measured exactly by anemometers on land. And even though the SFMR readings and the Dvorak numbers and other calculations are estimates and often not exact, they are all done
using the same exact methods, which means they can be used as a safe final measurement for all storms and that allows us to compare one storm to another using these estimated measurements. So they don't "pick a number for the documents." They "get" a final number through painstaking analysis taken from satellite images, recon, etc. And all are measured the same way.
