Active hurricane season forecast, but who listens?

Others, however, including researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech, hold that the increased proportion of strong storms could well be driven by global warming's heating effect on the oceans in the tropical Atlantic, where hurricanes form.

Yet for all the improvements that have been made in seasonal forecasts, they can be unintentionally misleading, notes Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane researcher at MIT. He points to the 1992 season, which was forecast as a season with lower-than- normal activity. Then hurricane Andrew slammed into south Florida.

This has led some forecasters, such as the group at Colorado State and AccuWeather Inc., to attempt landfall forecasts. Comparing today's preseason climate patterns with those of past active years, AccuWeather expects that six tropical cyclones will hit US coasts. Of those, the company expects five to be hurricanes and three to arrive as major hurricanes. As the season progresses, the risk shifts from the Gulf Coast to the Eastern seaboard up through New England, the company holds. The Colorado State group sees a 79 percent likelihood that at least one hurricane will strike the Gulf Coast; the figure is 89 percent for Florida and the East Coast.

But if seasonal forecasting is in its infancy compared with storm-specific forecasts, landfall forecasts are hardly out of the delivery room.

Trying to develop meaningful landfall outlook this far in advance is difficult because storms are driven by local and regional conditions that occur on time scales too short to forecast this far in advance, Dr. Bell notes. "Different combinations of conditions can produce an active season," and those combinations can impose different effects on weather conditions over the eastern US and the western Atlantic that govern storm tracks."

It's not at all clear that coastal residents are paying that much attention. After more than 20 years of seasonal forecasts for Atlantic hurricanes from one group and nearly 10 years' worth from others, a recent survey suggests too many residents in hurricane-prone areas aren't taking the basic steps that emergency-management experts recommend. For example, fewer than half of Gulf and Atlantic coast residents have a family-response plan or a hurricane "survival kit," according to a poll of 1,100 Americans for the National Hurricane Survival Initiative. At least a third lack adequate insurance.

If residents don't always take heed, insurance companies do, notes Dave Unnewehr, an official with the American Insurance Association in Washington. These forecasts can play roles in individual company decisions about coverage in hurricane-prone areas as well as in how much reinsurance companies may want to buy to protect them against excessive losses.

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