thetruesms wrote:So, I know this was posted completely tongue-in-cheek, but I decided to quickly dig through the archived graphics just for funsies. Assuming I kept count correctly, and it's possible I'm off by one or two because my eyes started to cross a little after staring at so many maps, this is now the 44th time any part of Florida - including the Keys - has been within the cone (I just lumped the 3 and 5 day cones together, because it was easier and my inspiration was a jokePatrick99 wrote:Just to inject a little levity.....how many times has South Florida been squarely in a 5-day cone over the last 10 years? Quite a few, if my memory serves me. How many of those actually turned out to be hits 5 days later?). 19 of the previous 43 times, the storm center was over Floridian soil. Doesn't sound like a good percentage off the bat. But, it's worth noting that most of these "misses" came from the edge of the 5-day cone nicking some part of Florida because by Day 5, the cone is pretty darn big - meanwhile, the actual forecast track wasn't in Florida's direction at all. Some were closer misses - i.e. a storm that passed through the Florida Straits, giving the Keys hurricane conditions, but never actually made a landfall; or a landfalling storm in Louisiana that headed east, only to have its last advisory given with the storm center in the Alabama Panhandle, about 10 miles west of the Florida border. Surely its remnants passed into Florida.
I suppose if I cared more, I would swing through again and definitively see how many times any of the forecast points were over Florida only to see NHC whiff on their track. But qualitatively, it wasn't very many - in the counting on one hand neighborhood. Ike and Irene were the notable misses, but not much beyond that.
And that, my friends, is what comes out of letting yourself be "inspired" by a facetious comment. I don't really recommend it, but if you want to try, I think I left a couple avenues for further research.
edit - also, this is only the 9th season with a public five day cone, so I didn't do 2003 to shave off a little effort.
Can I like this post somehow? lol
