Weatherlawyer wrote:
Tyvek Homewrap wrote:
On Tue, 11 Jul 2006 22:19:22 -0500, "Alexmcw"
wrote:

It looks as if the 2006 tropical storm-hurricane season is delayed compared
to last year - at least for the Atlantic.

Wood's expertise was "tidal flooding" and he focused on proxigean
spring tides, that is the high tides that occur when the lunar perigee
coincides with the syzygy (new and full moons).

Wood points out that while we can't be sure that strong onshore winds will
accompany high tides (causing the flooding) a look at the times of past
storms and proxigean tides shows that storms often accompany these high tides.

I call this hind-casting, that is mining a data base to arrive at
patterns that might be projected into the future.

I use the same sort of thing collecting data from reanalysis sites.

http://web.newsguy.com/bigbytes/tides/tides.htm

On the first page there is a perigee/apogee calculator, and as you can
see the next tidal peak will occur Sept 7-8th.

On http://web.newsguy.com/bigbytes/tides/tides3.htm I deal with the 2006
hurricane season. There I present two illustrations, each with a sine wave,
comparing the 2005 and 2006 tides, and showing the timing of the 2005 storms.

On June 1, University of Colorado climatologists Philip Klotzbach and William Gray
forecast 17 tropical storms in the Atlantic, nine of which would become hurricanes.
Five of these would be intense hurricanes. The season is 26 weeks long, and we
are a quarter of the way through that with no hurricanes yet.

Britain occupies some 10 degrees latitude and maybe 4 degrees of
longitude. It has three simultaneous high and three simultaneous low
tides at all times pulsing around the coast so that for example:

Bristol has a low tide the same time that Dover has an high, Hull has a low,
somewhere up near Wick has an high and it gets a bit muzzy because of Ireland
where on the west coast it is low, but by Liverpool it is high again.

And 12 or so hours later it is low tide at these places. So you might
say every 1 or 2 hundred miles the tide is completely different.

From your site:
"In 1978, the celestial circumstances of 1974 were repeating
themselves, almost exactly. The moon reached it's perigee on January 8
just 16 hours before the new moon on January 9, resulting in a storm
that swept from Virginia to Maine, with winds in excess of 70 miles per
hour. On the west coast California beaches were hit by severe tidal
flooding.

A month later the perigee and new moon were separated by 42 hours, as
the US saw what was called the Storm of the Century, the Blizzard of
'78 which stretched from Maine to Texas. Boston saw the most snow in 24
hours, the most snow in a single storm and the most snow on the
ground."

This idea is all over the place. All perigees and apogees occur within
a few days of one phase or another. They seem to incline toward the
phase though and the mechanism for that might reveal some interesting
coincidentae.

It was mooted at the turn of the 19th century as ephemerides became
available. I have a book allegedly explaining just the above as the way
you see it but it is not by the actual forecaster -a man who wrote
articles in the London papers and magazines of the era.

I tried doing the same thing but it didn't work and there was no
reason it should. But perhaps I missed something. I never seemed to
find time or enthusiasm to recheck it.

However there is a piece in the FAQs for uk.sci.weather about the
phenomena in the north sea, which takes place fairly frequently when
the pressure at the north of it is radically different from that at the
south:

"Storm surge:
When persistent, severe gales (usually stronger), markedly low
atmospheric pressure(*) and geographic 'funnelling' of the wind-driven
sea water are combined with astronomically high tides, then the
resulting storm (or tidal) surge can cause coastal sea levels to rise
several metres above the astronomically predicted level, with
inundation of low-lying areas.

Notable examples in regions bordering the North Sea occurred in 1099,
1236, 1287, 1421, 1697 and 1953. The North Sea is particularly prone to
such events because it is shallow relative to the open Atlantic - often
the source region for storm-driven waters - and its depth decreases
still further towards its southern/narrow end.

(* a decrease in pressure of roughly 10 mbar produces a sea-level rise
of about 10cm.)"
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/booty.weather/uswfaqfr.htm

I've written to the group poking holes in the idea from time to time.
All along the east coast of Britain the North Sea is experiencing a
wide variety of tides. OTOH of course they will all be under the same
lunar influence.

Time differences in the phases is one of the first things I considered.
It works in series to instill a synergy. (It's how to predict
hurricanes in the North Atlantic.)

However it turns out that the main function that controls the weather
is the actual time of the phase itself. Have you checked out the times
of the apsides? I confess I failed to. One bit of advice is don't give
up, let the pieces fall where they will and try not to force them to
fit.

And don't take setbacks as personal affronts.