“Let’s disband the NHC,” one weather watcher screamed, “just leave the GOES satellites up there, have someone point them in the right direction, and feed the pictures to the Internet sites so everyone can watch for themselves.”

Another said that “Debby just proves that only the system itself knows where it is headed! Forecast as we may, but the basic rule is still wait and watch!”

The only real cyclone so far, these people (www.storm2000.com) felt, was who ended up in the north Atlantic Ocean spinning around like a dog trying to catch his own tail.

Beryl and Chris dissipated before they knew they were cyclones leaving several countries on watches, warnings, or evacuated. Evacuations were well under way in the Florida Keys, at a cost of US$1 million per mile, in preparation for Debby Debby was an enigma. She was a case of the “left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing” because she could not pull herself together as a hurricanes does.

A cyclone comprises thunderstorms and winds revolving around a centre, normally referred to as the “eye”. The hole in the middle of a hurricane, as seen on satellite pictures, is the eye and it will form when the centres of circulation at the lower, middle, and upper levels of the atmosphere are stacked vertically. Debby’s problem is that the centres, at various levels of the atmosphere, never became aligned, and that’s why an eye was never found.

Hurricane hunters, renowned for their accuracy in locating the eye, were despatched but they returned to base empty-handed.

“The exact centre of Debby remains difficult to determine, reconnaissance aircraft have had a hard time closing off a well-defined low-level circulation,” NHC forecaster Stacy Stewart said in his discussion Monday morning. By 5 p.m., the circulation was found but Stewart noted that it was moving faster than the mid-and upper-level circulations.

“If Debby slows just a few knots then the low-level and mid-level circulations would become vertically stacked making Debby much stronger than the official forecast is indicating.”

By Wednesday severe turbulence hit Debby over the mountains of Hispaniola, “cat-spraddling” her. Her low-and mid-level circulations separated from the upper-level circulation during the day, the NHC
reported. On Thursday, Debby was history.

During this time forecasters relied on computer models which correctly forecast Debby passing north of the Leeward Islands but from that point they disagreed aggressively. One model took her smack into Miami, another into the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of the day, despite the complex models running on multi-million dollar computers, the judgement call was left to the human brain and that was what made the final call downgrading Debby to a tropical wave even while some models were shouting “no, she’s going to revive!”

“It’s still a lot of art,” Jamie Rhome, a meteorologist at the NHC, told the Palm Beach Post, Thursday. Always be prepared.