Winter's coming: Here's what to know about long-range weather outlooks.
Both hurricane and winter outlooks can offer value, but have limitations worth understanding.
'Long-range weather outlooks, those months-ahead prophesies of hurricane season storm counts and winter weather woes, garner ever-greater public interest. The annual rite of spring in the weather forecasting world is the projection of tropical storm activity for the coming months. The fall version, those popular winter outlooks, augur how miserably cold or snowy it could be.
Face it we love these semiannual pronouncements. They nourish our natural desire to know the future. The media loves them too, reveling in the soaring views and clicks generated by the presaging of the messaging.
There is benefit in the information shared, helping us be prepared for any calamitous weather that might come our way. Awareness and preparedness, kindled anew, is never a waste. But its also reasonable to critique those extended predictions when they appear to be wrong. They are, after all, a mix of intuition and emerging science, subject to a blurring of the lines between the two.
They often can capture the broad strokes of weather features months ahead of time, but seldom can pin down the finer details.'>>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/10/10/longrange-weather-outlooks-hurricanes-winter/?