Hurricanes

It's pretty obvious that we're not very good at predictng the path of hurricanes. Ophelia even did a cute little loop just to throw everyine off her scent.

But it turns out that we are really, really bad at predicting the path of hurricanes. Here's a cool series of images showing the predicted path of Ophelia by the 5 "best" models (as well as the NHS forecast, which I think is just a consensus model based onthe other 5), and a black line showing where she actually went. (Wait a couple of seconds for it to update.)



This came from wunderground.com. You can also see the forecast vs. actual for Katrina.

Some of the data points look pretty good. But most look really bad.