When our family first made the decision to move to Florida, almost nine years ago, we were warned that we should expect a steady stream of visitors from the north, especially in the winter months. Well, those potential visitors haven’t exactly overwhelmed us, but this summer, we’ve been impacted by and preparing for visits by some others: Fay, Gustav, Hanna, Ike, Josephine …

If you watch the hurricane forecasts, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that these so-called experts have no idea what a given storm is going to do. Sometimes, they blow up into big, swirling, category 3, 4, or 5 events. Other times, they hit some land, or perhaps some other weather impact, and become disorganized and weak. Baseball players are considered great hitters if they get on base 3 out of 10 times; I’m not sure if the “tropical storm experts” on The Weather Channel, or at AccuWeather, or on Weather Underground, or at the National Hurricane Center at NOAA, even come close to that .300 batting average. Certainly, their seasonal predictions have been off the mark for several years.

So, today, we are watching Hanna. Her projected path, 24 hours ago, had the center heading right for Jacksonville, with a Friday morning ETA as a category 2. Today, the projections now show her staying offshore by 100 miles or so. And not reaching our latitude until Friday afternoon. It still should mean some rain and wind, of course, but we’ve had a lot of that already this year.

Hanna’s siblings, Ike and Josephine, are wandering across the Atlantic too. Care to guess which direction they’ll go? You can check your prediction against the various forecasters, if you like, but you know they’ll be changing theirs at least once or twice a day.

Of course, there is potential danger in these storms, but there is also some entertainment. I especially like the TV reporters standing out in the storms, losing their hats, claiming how treacherous the conditions are. There was a classic scene a couple of years ago, as a local weather reporter stood in the middle of a street near the beach, breathlessly telling everyone how dangerous the situation was, and that it was a good thing that the streets were deserted, etc. Meanwhile, behind this intrepid reporter, viewers could see a couple of kids on skateboards, holding up bed sheets as makeshift sails, and having a great time.

In our old stomping grounds in New York State, hurricanes were very rare. We had some on Long Island where I grew up, but the upstate region was generally too far inland to suffer much impact from those storms. Oh, there were a couple, but they were once-in-a-decade events, if that. In Syracuse, our weather disasters were of the much colder variety. Proudly boasting the title of snowiest major city in the country, Syracusans generally would just push the snow out of the way and go about our business. But there were some exceptions … the winter of 1992-93, when 16 FEET of snow fell for the season, starting with 8 inches on Halloween, and not ending until a light dusting on snow on Mothers’ Day … the mid-March blizzard a few years before that, during which 42″ fell on our city in 24 hours … and the ice storms that were probably the worst of all. For those that haven’t experienced it, driving in freezing rain is what I’d consider the most dangerous, as the road can become a skating rink very quickly, and patches of “black ice” can throw cars into completely uncontrollable skids.

So, would I rather deal with hurricanes or blizzards? Well, it seems like there’s more time to prepare for the former, even if some of that preparation is for false alarms. But snowstorms tend to cause mostly inconvenience, while hurricanes often mean damage and perhaps death. Don’t misunderstand - winter weather up north can knock out power for extended periods of time, and some people do perish in the cold. But the impact is usually not as severe, either from the storms, or from the influx of TV talking heads that want to broadcast live from the scene.

All in all, though, I’d rather be in Florida. Even if our guests are named Hanna, Ike, Josephine …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Al. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.