There’s a ‘ghost hurricane’ in the forecast. It could help predict a real one
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A scary-looking weather forecast showing a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast in the second half of June swirled around social media this week—but don’t panic.
It’s the season’s first “ghost hurricane.”
Similar hype plays out every hurricane season, especially at the beginning: A cherry-picked, worst-case-scenario model run goes viral, but more often than not, will never come to fruition.
Unofficially dubbed “ghost storms” or “ghost hurricanes,” these tropical systems regularly appear in weather models — computer simulations that help meteorologists forecast future conditions — but never seem to manifest in real life.
The model responsible this week was the Global Forecast System, also known as the GFS or American model, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s one of many used by forecasters around the world.
All models have known biases or “quirks” where they tend to overpredict or underpredict certain things. The GFS is known to overpredict tropical storms and hurricanes in longer-term forecasts that look more than a week into the future, which leads to these false alarms. The GFS isn’t alone in this — all models struggle to accurately predict tropical activity that far in advance — but it is notorious for doing so.
For example, the GFS could spit out a prediction for a US hurricane landfall about 10 days from now, only to have that chance completely disappear as the forecast date draws closer. This can occur at any time of the year, but is most frequent during hurricane season — June through November.
It’s exactly what’s been happening over the past week as forecasters keep an eye out for the first storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.
Why so many ghosts?
No weather forecast model is designed in the exact same way as another, and that’s why each can generate different results with similar data.
The reason the GFS has more false alarms when looking more than a week out than similar models – like Europe’s ECMWF, Canada’s CMC or the United Kingdom’s UKM – is because that’s exactly what it’s programmed to do, according to Alicia Bentley, the global verification project lead of NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center.
The GFS was built with a “weak parameterized cumulus convection scheme,” according to Bentley. In plain language, that means when the GFS thinks there could be thunderstorms developing in an area where tropical systems are possible – over the oceans – it’s more likely to jump to the conclusion that something tropical will develop than to ignore it.
Other models aren’t built to be quite as sensitive to this phenomenon, and so they don’t show a tropical system until they’re more confident the right conditions are in place, which usually happens when the forecast gets closer in time.
The western Caribbean Sea is one of the GFS’ favorite places to predict a ghost storm. That’s because of the Central American gyre: a large, disorganized area of showers and thunderstorms that rotates over the region and its surrounding water.
Scientists mapped what happens if a crucial system of ocean currents collapses. The weather impact would be extreme
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The collapse of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents could push parts of the world into a deep freeze, with winter temperatures plunging to around minus 55 degrees Fahrenheit in some cities, bringing “profound climate and societal impacts,” according to a new study.
There is increasing concern about the future of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — known as the AMOC — a system of currents that works like a giant conveyor belt, pulling warm water from the Southern Hemisphere and tropics to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools, sinks and flows back south.
Multiple studies suggest the AMOC is weakening with some projecting it could even collapse this century as global warming disrupts the balance of heat and salinity that keeps it moving. This would usher in huge global weather and climate shifts — including plunging temperatures in Europe, which relies on the AMOC for its mild climate.
What’s less clear, however, is how these impacts will unfold in a world heated up by humans burning fossil fuels.
“What if the AMOC collapses and we have climate change? Does the cooling win or does the warming win?” asked Rene van Westen, a marine and atmospheric researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and co-author of the paper published Wednesday in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.
This new study is the first to use a modern, complex climate model to answer the question, he told CNN.
The researchers looked at a scenario where the AMOC weakens by 80% and the Earth is around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the period before humans began burning large amounts of fossil fuels. The planet is currently at 1.2 degrees of warming.
They focused on what would happen as the climate stabilized post-collapse, multiple decades into the future.
Even in this hotter world, they found “substantial cooling” over Europe with sharp drops in average winter temperatures and more intense cold extremes — a very different picture than the United States, where the study found temperatures would continue to increase even with an AMOC collapse.
Sea ice would spread southward as far as Scandinavia, parts of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, the research found. This would have a huge impact on cold extremes as the white surface of the ice reflects the sun’s energy back into space, amplifying cooling.
The scientists have created an interactive map to visualize the impacts of an AMOC collapse across the globe.
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