The various criticisms of Gray, and why they're bogus...

[Derecho]

I've seen pretty much all of the standard ones in the various threads today (in fairly mild form) but going back a good 6+ years I've seen them expressed far more viciously on a variety of boards and chats.

Let's set them up and knock 'em down:

1) "Gray keeps changing his forecast!"

For whatever reason it seems Gray, alone among meteorologists, is criticized for "changing" forecasts.

However, when a local TV met, on Monday, talks about the weather for the next weekend, and then talks about the weather, and changes the forecast, for the next weekend on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, that doesn't seem to bother anyone.

You'll get a forecast for the next 7 days a couple times a day from the NWS for a given area, and for a given day the forecast will change slightly each time.

Gray is simply doing this on a larger scale; issuing a forecast for a given period of months at differing times before those months.

Like all forecasts, they get more accurate the closer to the time forecast. Each forecast is carefully recorded. One can go back and compare them all to each other.

Gray doesn't "cherrypick" the forecasts that turned out to be right for a given season and attempt to hide the rest.

Bastardi, 5 days before Alex hit Hatteras, said that 90L in the GOM was the thing to watch and Alex would just be a hybrid storm that would skim the coast. He later changed to hyping Alex, talking about 100 kt sustained winds, Hatteras should be evacuated, etc. Yet he doesn't draw the same criticism as Gray for not "sticking" to his forecast. I drew attention to his initial forecast because no one else seemed to have.

2) "He's wasting money!"

This is one of the weirder ones. People seem strangely obsessed with the money he spends.

It's not like there's a 100 story Dr. Gray complex with 10 giant supercomputers and hundreds of minions doing his bidding creating his forecasts, all paid for with billions of dollars of government money.

It's him, probably a standard desktop PC or maybe a cheap workstation, and a handful of grad students (who cost next to nothing.) It's not some grand research project. And he's been largely funded by insurance companies recently anyway.

In the grand scheme of weather research projects the money he "spends" is microscopic.

3) His forecasts have no practical use!

Again he seems to be singled out among pure science for this criticism.

Hate to break it to you, but the multibillion dollar Hubble Space Telescope has no practical use either. Tens of billions of dollars are spent worldwide on pure science that saves no one's lives, improves no standards of living, simply on the principle that knowledge is good.

It's true that the seasonal activity forecast is of no practical use safetywise for anyone in the Atlantic basin. But it's interesting.

And insurance companies ARE interested in seasonal forecasting in order to manage risk.

However, the problem is there's no obvious direct link between seasonal activity and landfalls. Gray is trying landfall forecasting, which I consider basically impossible at this time, and actually so bad it's not interesting (I believe the same of Bastardi and anyone else attempting landfall forecasting well ahead of seasons.) Doesn't hurt to try, though.

4) He says the same thing every year!

Well, the same thing generally keeps actually HAPPENING since 1995; an active season. His one really blown forecast was failing to anticipate the 1997 El Nino and he busted high.

5) Everything is just based on ENSO, anyone could do his forecasts!

Really brilliant discoveries seem obvious, AFTER they happen. Gray DISCOVERED the relationship between El Nino and Atlantic hurricane activity, and this was back in the 70s when hardly anyone in the general public had heard of El Nino. It had to occur to someone to look for the relationship, because it's not an obvious one if no one has discovered it yet.

He's obviously got some sort of medical problem that affects his speech, and he doesn't really do all that many interviews, especially recently. His forecasts are fairly dry and abstract. Maybe it's because he doesn't try to develop some sort of fake chatty friendship with his readers or bore them with assorted stories about his weightlifting or discuss college football he's disliked.

His also a strident opponent of current "Global Warming" theory, but given that actually I think most tropical hobbyists aren't aware of that, I don't think that affects the general opinion of him.

[rainstorm]

al gore wont like him them!!

dr gray is cool. he knows his stuff

[Rainband]

al gore wont like him them!!

dr gray is cool. he knows his stuff

Keep the politics in the political forum

[HURAKAN]

People might critizise him because he fails every year by 3 or more tropical systems, after all he is not God or has a crystal ball. Also, changing or "updating" his forecast every 2 or 3 months, people seems to don't like that. To conclude, he is a great met & every year he send us a message telling us how the season is forecast to be. Now, I don't see a big change from the last forecast to this one, just one TS less, and one hurricane less, but we have to remember that only one tropical system takes to make this hurricane season, the most horrible ever. If we take out Andrew from the 1992 Hurricane Season we could say it was one very graceful and normal.

[Lindaloo]

Thanks for making sense of this Derecho. Excellent post.

[BayouVenteux]

Gray doesn't "cherrypick" the forecasts that turned out to be right for a given season and attempt to hide the rest...

...Bastardi, 5 days before Alex hit Hatteras, said that 90L in the GOM was the thing to watch and Alex would just be a hybrid storm that would skim the coast. He later changed to hyping Alex, talking about 100 kt sustained winds, Hatteras should be evacuated, etc. Yet he doesn't draw the same criticism as Gray for not "sticking" to his forecast. I drew attention to his initial forecast because no one else seemed to have.

...Maybe it's because he doesn't try to develop some sort of fake chatty friendship with his readers or bore them with assorted stories about his weightlifting or discuss college football he's disliked.

C'mon...no need to lace an excellent defense of Dr.Gray with your already well documented dislike of Mr. Bastardi. I think Joe Bastardi would be the first to agree that Dr. Gray is THE preeminent scholar and researcher in the field of tropical meteorology. Joe Bastardi clearly owes much of what he knows and does to the accomplishments resulting from the 4 decades of work by Dr. Gray and his many protégé...and has on occasion stated such.

Comparing an academic meteorological researcher/theorician of Dr. Gray's stature to an amiable commercial weather forecaster/media personality simply does not make for a sound parallel. It's somewhat akin to Dr. Stephen Hawking going up against Bill Nye The Science Guy.

It's just an unfortunate sign of the times we're living in that, in the eyes of many, whether it be free trade politics or French philosophy, atmospheric studies or automotive repair, good talkers trump great thinkers. That's entertainment.

[Trader Ron]

Derecho,

Great Post!

It would be a disservice if Dr Gray saw something in the tropics, that would change his numbers UPWARD and didn't change them. I'd bet a Buck that there would not be any "bashers" of Dr Gray if he increased his numbers.

[wxman57]

I would also point out, regarding the money, that Dr. Gray isn't government-funded. He gets most of his money from an insurance company, I believe.

[chadtm80]

EXACTLY Derecho.. Thank you..

I would also think that If gray had just raised the number of storms by three.. There would be no complaining either

[Steve Cosby]

Would not the value of the Dr. Gray forecast outside of the actual users of the forecast (like the insurance companies) be the fact that every year's forecast seems to include a little tidbit about finding a relationship here or there. That is, I seem to recall in reading many of these that there may be a small blurb that they have found that "such and such" parameter seems to equate to "such and such" activity. Just like the "big" find of the relationship to El Nino, I would think that Dr. Gray's work will one day again find a big one.

By the way, you can't take politics of these things. Politics results in funding being taken away or diverted to more worthy pursuits like excrement in jars of urine or [insert somebody's pet project here].