Cerabino: Tight election, COVID: Now we must worry about a November storm? Can this year just end already

Palm Beach Post (FL)

We’ll be looking this weekend in South Florida at the unusual specter of an approaching tropical storm in November.

As if this year needed something else.

I know. The hurricane season isn’t officially over until the end of the month. But this isn’t normal. We should be done by now.

From the years 1851 through 2015 there have only been five recorded hurricanes that have made landfall in the United States.

More: Weakened Eta crawling across Central America, forecast cone shifts sharply west

Most years, not a single hurricane forms during the month of November. The atmospheric conditions aren’t conducive to it.

But this year? Why not? Heap it on.

With an intensifying COVID-19 pandemic and a razor-thin rancorous presidential election on our plates, the scheduling gods figured that it’s a good time to work in another category of calamity.

This would fall under the theory: When it rains, it pours. Literally.

So, let’s entertain a potential Hurricane Eta in the mix. After being bombarded with months of medical and political forecasting, it will be reassuring to touch base with our old friend, weather forecasting.

Such poetry.

“The official forecast is a blend of the latest GFS and ECMWF predictions, but leans toward the latter model,” the National Hurricane Center advised on Eta. “This track could take the system near or over portions of extreme southern Florida by late this weekend or early next week, but there is a low confidence in the forecast, especially at 3-5 days.”

Low-confidence forecasts?

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Don’t worry. We’re practically numb to them already -- but we appreciate the honesty. It’s refreshing.

We’ll just consider Eta the weather equivalent of an early call on Arizona’s election results, or a President Donald Trump coronavirus prediction that “it’s like a miracle. It will disappear.”

We’ve been thrown enough low-confidence forecasts this year to make us experts on cynicism.

As I write this, Eta is a tropical depression that is working its way through Central America on a course that will send it out to sea, where it will become a tropical storm as it moves over Cuba and then the Florida Straits.

The spaghetti models show it bending toward the Florida peninsula on the Gulf side and heading Northwest where it may or may not develop into a hurricane or bend back toward Florida.

On a normal year, I’d be paying more attention. But I’m suffering from Acute Forecasting Fatigue Syndrome.

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Just the sound of Wolf Blitzer’s voice saying, “We have an important projection” sends me into a fetal position on the couch.

I’ve spent so much time poring over the COVID projections and the presidential election projections that I find another area of crystal-balling the future almost too much to consider.

I’m tired of being disappointed or falsely elated.

How can I worry about the path of a storm when the path of a deadly virus or the path of Trump’s reign is at stake?

If there were five words that aptly describe this year, they would be “Ready for it to end.”

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And that includes a hurricane season that has seen so many storms that it blew through the alphabet of names, and is now relegating storms to letters in the Greek alphabet.

At this point, I half expect National Hurricane Center Director Ken Graham to announce that we’re “rounding the corner” on this year’s hurricane system.

Next up. Hurricane Theta.

Cue the dramatic theme music.

“We have an important CNN projection. Hurricane Theta will knock out power in South Florida on Thanksgiving Day.”

fcerabino@gannett.com

@FranklyFlorida

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Cerabino: Tight election, COVID: Now we must worry about a November storm? Can this year just end already

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