United States Landfalling Hurricane Probability Project

Hurricane Target: NYC-Area

I recently came across the United States Landfalling Hurricane Probability Project, an interactive web project co-developed by the Tropical Meteorology Research Project at Colorado State University and the GeoGraphics Laboratory at Bridgewater State College. The Project is simply awesome if you're a geek like me, and especially if you're fascinated by tropical weather and hurricane season!

When you access the fully customizable interactive database, based on the parameters you enter, it will calculate the probability of a hurricane landfalling along a particular United States region, as well as by state and county. So using a number of variables, here's the likelihood of a tropical storm or hurricane striking the NYC-area this year and beyond:

• 23 percent chance the NYC-area will be hit with a tropical storm or hurricane in 2010 (normal value is 15 percent)
  
  
• 7 percent chance the NYC-area will be hit with a major hurricane (category 3 or stronger) in 2010 (normal value is 4 percent)
  
  
• 99.4 percent chance the NYC-area will be hit with a hurricane in the next 50 years
  
  
• 90 percent chance the NYC-area will be hit with a major hurricane (category 3 or stronger) in the next 50 years.

Nearly a 100 percent chance the NYC-area will be hit with a category 3 hurricane in coming years?! That would be incredible! I can just imagine it now... a hurricane gathers strength in the tropics, picks up forward speed as it travels across the warm Atlantic waters. It gets picked by the westerlies north of the Caribbean Islands and shoots northward up the Gulf Stream at such a rapid speed that it doesn't have enough time over cooler waters to blow off steam. It manages to drop from a category 5 to a 4, and barely holds onto 3, but slam! It hits the NYC-area just east of Manhattan and landfalls in Suffolk County, Long Island as a weak category 3 with winds near 115 mph, gusts as high as 150 mph. Absolutely devastating!

Whew... I just got so heated writing that! Time to call it quits for today, but don't you quit till you play around with the United States Landfalling Hurricane Probability Project. I think you'll find it pretty interesting... and fun!