ROCK wrote:Fci, if we should rely on climo then we should be watching the CLIPPER....point is prior tracks though entertaining do not provide us anything. We have no idea what the synopics were in 1913..sure we can guess but every year is different. If 97 forms at a different lat or moves more westward in a weaken state you get a totally different set of tracks...that do not favor RECURVE...
climo is ever changing...its like when someone says we are over due for a major....there is no such thing as over due.....there is no odds. Do we really play the odds when we are talking about a hurricane? We aint in Vegas.....
The first sentence would be incorrect. As 57 pointed out, we don't use climo as a forecast, but rather as a tool to understand the past odds of storm paths. Averaging out these paths into a forecast really doesn't make any sense. However, understanding that say 10% of the time a storm in this location will affect the U.S. does.
When storms are this far out from land, climatology is a good tool to understand a variety of potential outcomes for the given storm. However, it needs to be used in the correct context.