When I heard Bill Read talk at the Tucson AMS meeting last spring, he said that the NHC was willing and able to issue TS watches/warnings BEFORE a disturbance was upgraded, in cases where an upgrade was certain. That didn't seem to happen with Tomas, though.
The loss of QuikSCAT was certainly a blow to forecasters trying to determine the presence of an LLC by satellite alone. But Colin, Danielle, Earl, Fiona, Gaston, Igor, Julia and Lisa were classified without QS and with very few obs available. Satellite is an effective tool, but it can mislead. Sometimes a clear circulation is aloft and not at the surface.
In the case of Tomas, satellite showed very strong spiral banding 24 hours before it was classified a TS (and a rapidly-intensifying TS at that). But there were no observations to the south of Tomas to verify the closed LLC, and it appears cloud tops weren't cold enough to warrant a higher Dvorak rating. Clearly, though, 91L looked much more impressive on satellite than did 92L (Shary).
With the significant threat looming for the east Caribbean, recon should have been in 91L much earlier than yesterday afternoon. And I think that it was very clear 91L was a TS as early as Thursday, as a ship NE of the center was reporting 35kt winds that afternoon. In the case of 91L/Tomas, an upgrade to at least a TD was warranted. There would have been no harm in doing so, even if 91L fizzled, something that didn't appear likely given the rapid organization evident on satellite. Waiting for recon was not a good decision in hindsight, they should have just pulled the trigger a lot earlier, maybe on Thursday afternoon.
Richard was another case of a slow upgrade. And that system HAD surface obs to show a clear LLC long before it was upgraded. NHC would probably argue that convection around the center maybe wasn't organized or strong enough for an upgrade. OK, then how do they explain keeping Fiona a TS for 24-48 hours after it had weakened to just a single well-detached squall south of Bermuda?
I like the idea of a separate group of hurricane specialists, separate from the NHC. Their job is to continually assess the status of all tropical disturbances, upgrading and downgrading when warranted, based on the data available. No political, location, or past history considerations. Either a system IS a TD/TS/H or it is not. Doesn't matter if it was just upgraded to a hurricane 2 hours ago. If it's suddenly hit by shear and recon can't find winds over 50 kts, then it's now a TS again. If a disturbance has a closed circulation but no big squalls near the center, then it's a TD. Either that or when a previously-named TD/TS has its convection stripped away then it's downgraded to an open wave. Can't have it both ways.
The NHC forecasters would then just have to deal with what that agency/group tells them is there. Hey, that's what I have to do every day!
Oh, and one more thing. The probability of development duties should not be done by the same people who decide when to upgrade a disturbance. In reality, the NHC is predicting just how likely it is that they will upgrade a disturbance in 48 hours, as the determination is purely subjective. For Tomas, a 20% chance of development within 48 hrs was issued Thursday morning. At the time, it already appeared to have developed an LLC. What was that 20% based upon? We had 70-80% at the same time in our forecasts.
