I have no technical expertise in this area so I looked only at historical statistics. I looked at all the years and first, based on years with high numbers and with similar tracks (although there is never going to be a terribly close match) I focused on 1887-1888, 1933-34, and 1969-70. 1995-1996 was not a good fit. Then I factored in a little higher activity because of 2003-2004 statistics. Also looked at how quickly the stats tend to fall off after peak years.

I came up with initial ranges of 14-16 / 7-8 / 2-4 and an ACE of 160-175, and 3-4 GOM landfalls.

I'm still working on figuring a way to narrow that down.

* * * * * *

OK this is what I came up with.

15 / 8 / 3

ACE of 165

Now I thought this was very interesting: When you go back and look at Dr Gray's forecast, at the beg of Dec 2004 he forecast a normal year: only 11/6/3. In April he updated that to 13/7/3, and in May to 15/8/4.

From looking at the data, apparently 2005 is the very first time there was a third year in a row with ACE values above normal (75-117). The records are only a little over a hundred years old so we may be looking at more like a 500-year cycle, or overall global warming may be kicking the ACE stats up a bit. There were pairs of years with high ACE values well before this past decade, so it still does not definitely follow that something out of the ordinary is occuring. However if we do have a 4th year with a high ACE value as I think, it will definitely be considered unusual. So my ACE prediction could be way too high for what should be expected next year.

The reason I picked the three storm numbers that I did, is because I looked at the dropoffs from similar years and went down about the same percentage. But I didn't spend enough time on the pattern of the tracks each season and this weekend am going to go back and try to find good matches on the tracks, for years that did not have a high number of storms, and may make some changes based on that, before Monday.

So, because my guess is based on statistical patterns from previous years, which are set, I won't change it as the year progresses, based on other factors, because I didn't take those factors into account in the first place. And I don't think it is sporting to change the numbers once the season starts.