# 4719
An interesting tool I’ve been playing with the past couple of days is the United States landfalling hurricane web project which has been co-developed by William Gray's Tropical Meteorology Research Project at Colorado State University and the GeoGraphics Laboratory at Bridgewater State College.
Based on a combination of historical climatological data, along with Dr. Gray’s updated forecast for 2010, this website provides Tropical Storm, Hurricane, and Major Hurricane landfalling probabilities for 11 regions and 205 counties along the U.S. coastline from Texas to Maine.
Much of this data is downloadable in Microsoft Excel format for your own study.
The `interactive’ portion of the website allows you to input your state and county, and get a readout of the strike probabilities for the upcoming tropical season.
These are, of course, just probabilities.
A low-probability rating is no guarantee that a storm won’t strike your region this year.
These are interesting calculations, but a low probability rating is not something you should base your decision on whether you will prepare for hurricane season this year.
I’ve run the calculator for Miami-Dade county, and here are the results (Historic climatology percentages are in parentheses).
First, the overall state of Florida’s calculation. A 75% chance of a landfalling hurricane this year, and more than 33% chance of a Major Hurricane.
Next, specific data for Miami-Dade County (slightly reformatted).
During the last century, there were 73 major landfalling hurricanes from Texas to Maine. Some areas of the coastline were spared (areas 7 & 9), but that is no guarantee that a storm won’t hit there sometime in the future.
Hurricane season predictions are improving, but are a long way off from being something you can bank on. Every year could be the year that a hurricane strikes your region, regardless of the odds.
For Hurricane preparedness information visit FEMA’s Hurricane Page.
