Www.seasonalhurricanepredictions.org

Seasonal hurricane forecasts are produced ahead of each Atlantic hurricane season by a range of different groups, from national meteorological services to academic groups to private weather forecasting companies. While these forecasts are generally made freely available by the groups who produce them (usually on their organization’s website), there was, until recently, no website centralizing this information. This made gathering that information time consuming (if one is aware of all the given forecasts in the first place) and made comparisons between different forecast agencies and ensemble operations difficult.

Here, we present a recent initiative, “www.seasonalhurricanepredictions.org”, which aggregates over twenty seasonal forecasts of Atlantic hurricane activity ahead of the hurricane season and display them on a user-friendly platform. The site offers ensemble forecasts of tropical cyclone, hurricane and major hurricane numbers as well as accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) as soon as the first predictions are produced in March and is updated throughout the season as more forecasts become available. The website also supplies supporting information on the forecasts themselves and their performance at the end of the season, but also more broadly on seasonal forecasting and hurricane activity.

In addition to presenting the different features of the portal, we also review the accuracy of the ensemble predictions for the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season and look ahead to the upcoming 2018 season.