2013 Hurricane Season Post-Mortem

I’ve been slacking on my hurricane predictions follow-up - my last season wrap-up was for the 2011 season. The end of the hurricane season this year is getting some press because it has been so underwhelming; by one summary, it was the least intense season in thirty years. Yes, that’s the Atlantic season, but even the tragic Typhoon Haiyan in the Phillipines wasn’t the record-breaker it initially was represented to be: it was the fourth strongest typhoon ever, and the seventh strongest to hit the Philipines, though you don't see many follow-up stories correcting the earlier hype over it.

So I need to update the year-by-year CSU prediction follow-up, since few media outlets lay the numbers out in black and white (and blue and yellow and pink); here’s an updated version of my chart from 2011, with seasons back to 2005, extended through the 2013 season:

CSU's 350% over-estimation of the number of hurricanes this season is its widest miss over all these years, by a large margin.

Here's the sources for the 2012 and 2013 season numbers:

2012 Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project predictions:

Extended Range Forecast of Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Activity and Landfall Strike Probability for 2012 (PDF) (see table on page 2)

2012 Hurricane Season Statistics:

National Hurricane Center, 2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season (See the big graphic)


2013 Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project predictions:
Extended Range Forecast of Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Activity and Landfall Strike Probability for 2013 (PDF) (see table, again, on page 2)

2013 Hurricane Season Statistics:
National Hurricane Center, 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season (See this year's big graphic)