Hurricane Earl in Historical Context

The image above is from the ICAT Damage Estimator and shows the current position of Hurricane Earl, along with the tracks of all historical storms that passed within 50 miles of that position.  The histogram on the left shows the historical normalized damage in 2010 values for those 12 historical storms, which had a median damage of about $3 billion.

Below is a map produced by the ICAT Damage Estimator of the current National Hurricane Center 5-day forecast cone, showing that the storm is forecast to remain offshore.  If the storm were forecast to make landfall, then you could use to ICAT Damage Estimator to compare normalized damage from analogous historical storms under 2010 conditions.

 The graph below shows the individual forecast model predictions for the track of Earl, illustrating a high degree of agreement across the models.

The ICAT Damage Estimator does not make predictions, but it is very useful for putting official predictions into a historical context.  Have a look.

Stay tuned, Fiona, the next storm in line could be interesting.