So what does the hurricane forecast mean?

It mean it is still a crapshoot how the season will turn out. The forecast does not predict where the storms might go or whether they’ll even hit land. And if they hit land, which land.

At the risk of taking people off their guard, the Hurricane Center likes to point to 1992. It was predicted to be a minimal hurricane season, and indeed there were only seven tropical storms and four hurricanes, only one of which even hit land.

But it was one of the most devastating hurricane years ever. That one was the Category 5 Andrew, the storm that took 15 lives when it struck south Florida and took many more in its aftermath.

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Jan Ellen SpiegelEnergy & Environment Reporter

janellenspiegel@comcast.net

Jan Ellen is CT Mirror's regular freelance Environment and Energy Reporter. As a freelance reporter, her stories have also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Yale Climate Connections, and elsewhere. She is a former editor at The Hartford Courant, where she handled national politics including coverage of the controversial 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. She was an editor at the Gazette in Colorado Springs and spent more than 20 years as a TV and radio producer at CBS News and CNN in New York and in the Boston broadcast market. In 2013 she was the recipient of a Knight Journalism Fellowship at MIT on energy and climate. She graduated from the University of Michigan and attended Boston University’s graduate film program.

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