Update: we have a winner!
It took longer than I’d have liked to publish the results of this contest. I was traveling out of the country. But I’d like to congratulate KP on winning the Lee forecast contest.
One thing that I realized after the fact: my changes below made it so only whole numbers could be used for latitude and longitude. I’ve fixed that for next time!
Original post
The prodigal game returns! A technical glitch ruined the Dorian contest in 2019, so we haven’t seen a Funnel Fiasco tropical forecast game since Hurricane Matthew in 2016. But I’m pleased to announce that we’re up and running for Hurricane Lee. You can submit your landfall forecast by 2100 UTC on Wednesday 13 September.
In keeping with tradition, we’re still using the same crappy Perl script I wrote in 2005. Despite the fact that I’ve been putting off a total rewrite for over a decade, I did make a few improvements recently:
- Numerical fields now require numeric input. If you were hoping to submit “butts” as your wind speed, I’m sorry to disappoint you.
- Coordinates are constrained to reasonable ranges. I refuse to give in to Kevin’s whining about west being negative numbers. (I believe my exact words to him were “take it up with the Prime Meridian.”) But I was feeling magnanimous so I’ve constrained the latitude to 0–90 degrees north and the longitude to 180 degrees west to 10 degrees east.
- Similarly, wind speed is now constrained to realistic values. You can’t submit a wind speed less than zero or above 200 miles per hour.
- Furtherly similar, the time segments can’t be negative or overflow.
So go ahead and submit your forecast by 2100 UTC on Wednesday so you can join in the grand tradition.