Great post Ed. I also think there have been no TD/TS yet this year. I save my bashing for the models for the most part, the GFDL being my favorite target. Garbage for the most part, even though it has performed better the last two years IMO.

Politics plays a part in this area, for sure. It costs alot of money for emergency shelters to be opened, phone banks to be manned, evacs, ect. Most of the time local govenments have to pay the piper with money us locals (and states and the federal gov. as well) don't want to come up with. All this has to come into play when a NHC forecaster makes a call on naming (or just putting out an advisory on) a system. When the system has few, if any, tropical features, it's up to the local weather people to get the word out, because when the NHC speaks people sometimes take it as an end-of-the world type of thing. I have thought in the past the NHC went a little too far in naming some systems that were no threat to anyone or anything. I think they're getting it right this year. Just because a weather event caused 3000 people to die, and I'm really sorry that happened, does't mean you have to give it a name. Giving it a name would not have saved lives in that case this past May, nor will it bring any one of them back. If you must, call it whatever you like. Make it TS Alex in your book, and count it. Do it for today's system as well. But please don't do it just because we are not going to have a named system for the first two months of the season. We'll have plenty of real tropical cyclones to track in a short time.

Of course, that time is not now. The tropics are about as void of features as you'll ever see in late July. But soon, fellow storm trackers, soon.