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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.
Jan Beutel was half-watching a live stream of Kleines Nesthorn, a mountain peak in the Swiss Alps, when he realized its cacophony of creaks and rumbles was getting louder. He dropped his work, turned up the sound and found himself unable to look away.
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“The whole screen exploded,” he said.Beutel, a computer engineer specializing in mountain monitoring, had just witnessed a glacier collapse. On May 28, an avalanche of millions of tons of ice and rock barreled down the slope, burying Blatten, a centuries-old village nestled in the valley below.
Local authorities had already evacuated the village after parts of the mountain had crumbled onto the glacier; a 64-year old man believed to have stayed remains missing.
But no one expected an event of this magnitude.
Successive rock avalanches onto the glacier increased the pressure on the ice, causing it to melt faster and the glacier to accelerate, eventually destabilizing it and pushing it from its bed. The collapse was sudden, violent and catastrophic. “This one just left no moment to catch a breath,” Beutel said.
The underlying causes will take time to unravel. A collapse of this magnitude would have been set in motion by geological factors going back decades at least, said Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.But it’s “likely climate change is involved,” he said, as warming temperatures melt the ice that holds mountains together. It’s a problem affecting mountains across the planet.
People have long been fascinated with mountains for their dramatic beauty. Some make their homes beneath them — around 1 billion live in mountain communities — others are drawn by adventure, the challenge of conquering peaks.
These majestic landscapes have always been dangerous, but as the world warms, they are becoming much more unpredictable and much deadlier.
“We do not fully understand the hazard at the moment, nor how the dangers are changing with climate change,” said David Petley, an Earth scientist at the University of Hull in England.
Beirut, Lebanon
CNN
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A deadly Israeli airstrike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in southern Beirut on Friday has left over a dozen people dead, including a high-ranking Hezbollah commander, sharply escalating the conflict between the two sides and raising fears of all-out war.
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Senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, part of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, was assassinated along with “about 10” other commanders, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, accusing them of planning to raid and occupy communities in Galilee in northern Israel.Hezbollah confirmed Aqil’s death on Friday, saying he was killed “following a treacherous Israeli assassination operation on 09/20/2024 in the southern suburbs of Beirut.”
According to Hagari, the targeted commanders were “underground underneath a residential building in the heart of the Dahiyeh neighborhood, using civilians as a human shield” at the time of the attack.
Lebanon’s health ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 66 others injured in the airstrike, which leveled a multistory building in a densely populated neighborhood.
Aqil had a $7 million bounty on his head from the United States for his suspected involvement in the 1983 strike on the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed 63 people, as well as the bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks, which killed 241 US personnel later that year.
A CNN team on the ground in Beirut saw a frantic effort to rescue people from underneath the rubble and rush the wounded to hospital. Witnesses said nearby buildings shook for nearly half an hour after the strike, which the IDF said it had carried out at around 4 p.m. local time.
A week of surprise attacks
Friday’s strike marked the fourth consecutive day of surprise attacks on Beirut and other sites across the country, even as Israeli forces continued deadly strikes and operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.The first major attack against Hezbollah this week came Tuesday afternoon when pagers belonging to the militant groups’ members exploded near-simultaneously. The pagers had been used by Hezbollah to communicate after the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged members to switch to low-tech devices to prevent more of them from being assassinated.
Almost exactly 24 hours later, Lebanon was rocked by a second wave of explosions, after Hezbollah walkie-talkies detonated in Beirut and the south of the country on Wednesday.
At least 37 people were killed, including some children, and more than 3,000 were injured in the twin attacks.
In a United Nations Security Council meeting on Friday, UN human rights chief Volker Turk on Friday warned that the detonation of communication devices could violate international human rights law.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib and Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon clashed at the heated meeting, with Bou Habib calling on the council to condemn Israel’s actions and Danon slamming the Lebanese envoy for not mentioning Hezbollah.
