Hurricane Tracking Was Easier In the OLD DAYS... and better...more fun

Today it has reached a degree of ridiculous ... of sheer comedy not wind shear and you want to just slap someone silly in the head of late. No one person in particular though I can think of a few. Government people, network people, media...

This is not brain science.

They are low pressure systems. They stay away from the high pressure and they go towards low pressure systems. Like being like and all as a rule they don't like highs.

In the "old days" we sat around waiting for the Hurricane Center or the Local Weather Office to issue an advisory and give us cords that we marked on beautiful maps we either held onto over time or got from the Miami News or Miami Herald. Amos and Andy characters on the radio station's free map. Roll up copies given out by hardware stores. We drew the track..we were young, we could see the little dots...we drew lines between the cords. We watched the evening news to see where the fronts were or if there were fronts. We got reports from the Caribbean, from ships...

It was a beautiful science developing that has been well...let's leave the word I was going to use out of this... crapped up. How's that for a substitute word. My father liked that word.

We either dum it down with fancy graphics and cartoon images on modern screens or we try to over analyze it to death trying to verify every model so that we have a pot of spaghetti spilled all over our lap tops and those tracks are burning holes into our brain if you ask me.

It ain't that difficult.

I suppose if we want to fight for government funds we can beg for more (everyone is) and develop better and better models but when it comes down to it there cannot be a real prescision ever because that is the built in beauty of hurricanes. There are so many factors and they all compete for attention. There is sometimes no balance...one feature just takes over.

The Cubans did it best. They always did.

And, the Seminoles knew what you need to know... you watch for a good strong Easterly wind (or southerly) that does not stop.. as if someone turned a fan on and you know there is a storm out there. That combined with basic tracking tells you...there is a storm, radio reports tell you its a big one... and you can prog it by hand to get a damn good track that if needed can be changed according to developing weather trends.

Today they are mired down with a million news stations and people looking over their shoulders at every word in a discussion which can be fun if you are doing it with the right person at 2am but in all honesty is ridiculous.

It ain't that hard.

Have seen a few guys in the old days of online.. SNONUT, PTRAVEL, Robert in Tally and a few who are still doing it take a storm and look at the conditions down the road and almost by hand move the systems around and find landfall days, days...away. Sometimes they would get it within 50 miles or 75 from as far away as a week a way.

It's weather guys.

It is not THAT hard if you know what you are doing and aren't afraid to take the chance, and have the balls to put your money where your mouth is.. mind is and give a forecast.

All the models, all the whizzy bells... Jim tells me during a moment in the storm that I should watch out because the pressures are lowest down my way (meaning NMB) and the storm is going to make that turn that a model had predicted but so many forecasters sort of threw out as "out there" and Jim was right. I remember it. On the porch..looking around.. and half an hour or so later we were sitting outside in patio chairs in the driveway with still wind and in the eye of Katrina.

So... yes we took them serous, yes our parents shopped and bought supplies, we boarded up and we filled up bathtubs with water and a little chlorine and we knew it was part of the price we pay of living in the tropics that every few years we had a rash of bad storms....and then they would go off for ten years or so and hit Texas or North Carolina.

We didn't freak or talk about selling homes and moving Wyoming though maybe a lot of those people just snuck away in the night and we thought they were moving down the road to Palmetto. Who knows.

I do know that this is ridiculous the way it is being done nowdays and we cannot expect perfection from a science that's beauty is that you are flying by the seat of your pants with an everchanging atmosphere on a swirling ball that is spinning slowly in space.

It's all fluid.

Enjoy it a little... enjoy every damn moment of hurricane days and pray the bad ones don't find you. And, if they do... you pick up and rebuild because the story is not in the destruction but in the rebuilding, in the surviving .... those are the true heroes of the storm.

Bobbi...

Waiting to see today where Wilma will go and not expecting she has to follow any one specific model. Hell..if I was Wilma I wouldn't. I'd do whatever the hell I want.. there should be some rewards to being a Major Hurricane of any category. Watch, wait.. prepare if needed, hunker down, hide from the wind, run from the water and listen to Bryan Norcross on the radio when the power goes out.

Bobbi Style 2005