Please do not misuse impact and landfall. My forecast was overdone enough without the exaggeration. The fact is that landfall, like total number, is over-rated. The question is what happens to a given site with a storm that had tropical origin. Example:
Ernesto did a half billion dollars damage after it was downgraded. You are correct in saying I am overdone on impact. But remember last year I was leading the pack in saying little activity ( march forecast) the year before nailed the high impact season. Those that have watched me over the years, have seen that ideas from 02-05 were very good, if not underdone in 05. 07, like this year, was not a year I can point to with any degree of satisfaction. So I am aware of that aspect. And total intensity this year was no where near normal but bordering on hyperactive ( since I think there are two more developments, it will get to hyper active levels)

There is enough right and wrong so that no one out there I saw nailed the season. If you want to say 16 storms, 5 or 6 majors is a normal year, that is simply wrong.. I admit the impact idea on my part is overdone, but lets make sure we understand what I am forecasting.
Note: I have specifically directed my company to make sure that in using my forecast we use impact, not landfall, where impact is defined as the actual weather caused by a storm of tropical origin. If there was confusion, there should be none now.

Why the high impact score so early. I simply took the mean of years that had the kind of ace index I believed would occur (150-200) and played the mean of those years. From 5 months out, the forecast for such a high number was being scoffed at, but if someone told you, as a scientist, there was going to 16-18 storms and 5 majors arguably 6 ( Alex was 947 mb with a 12 mile wide eye) what would have been your impact conclusion on the US coastline. The fact is that until May, the other big guns in the forecast debate did not have as active a season coming s I had put out in February .

I am not justifying the US impact forecast as much as saying that if you thought the season was going to be normal, perhaps
you should look in the mirror before throwing the stones

All the best
JB

I suspect you’re just trying to drive traffic to your blog, but it is about time to reactivate this thread as there’s news about a TS or TC brewing for the Gulf.

Englehart, P. J., M. D. Lewis, and A. V. Douglas. 2008. Defining the frequency of near-shore tropical cyclone activity in the eastern North Pacific from historical surface observations (1921–2005). Geophysical Research Letters, 35, L03706, doi:10.1029/2007GL032546.

There has been a long term decline in EPAC activity-they even looked at windspeeds and pressures, and average central pressures have been going up, windspeeds down, and there appears to be some decadal variability which reminds me of that in the NATL, but of course inverted. Look at the strong storms in the era of weak storms in the Atlantic, and in the fifties and sixties and today, those strong storms disappeared:

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/wp-images/more_hysteria_fig2.JPG

With regard to ENSO and the Tropical mean, yes that is a major component of it. Of course, outside of the ENSO region proper this response is damped. The effect then of the differencing that Vecchi and Soden (and Swanson) have been suggesting is to: Decrease the amplitude of ENSO events in the Pacific and reverse their sign in the Atlantic. So the differencing basically matches up well with the expectations of El Nino.

Also, when one does this the AMO very nicely emerges from the Atlantic. Unfortunately Vecchi and Soden completely skipped over the EPAC, so I haven’t a clue what that would look like.

Interestingly, despite the notion that AGW should decrease storm frequency and increase intensity, these two appear to be directly rather than inversely related in existing record. I don’t get how anyone thinks that these two phenomena could suddenly cease to be co-dependent.

The tropical mean SST is a proxy for ENSO to a large extent.

BTW, my view that it is the regional climate variation that is not associated with the global change is very consistent with Vecchi and Soden’s work showing that MPI is approximated by subtracting tropical mean SST from MDR SST:

Vecchi, G.A. and B.J. Soden. 2007. Effect of remote sea surface temperature change on tropical cyclone potential intensity. Nature, 450, 1066-1071.