Hurricane Irene, US Landfall |
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Hurricane Irene made US landfall on August 27 after days of concern expressed in the media and by public officials. It had been category 3, but by the time it hit land in Morehead City, North Carolina it had slowed to category 1. Irene hit the Outer Banks of North Carolina about 7:30 a.m. ET Saturday morning, losing some power but still whipping up sustained winds of 85 mph, as it continued its run up the Eastern Seaboard. The National Hurricane Center said the eye of the enormous Category 1 storm passed over Cape Lookout, with winds slipping a bit from 100 mph overnight, but warned Irene would remain a hurricane as it moves up the mid-Atlantic coast. At 2 p.m. ET Irene was about 45 miles west northwest of Cape Hatteras, N.C., and about 95 miles south of Norfolk, Va. The storm was moving north-northeastward at 15 mph. The GCP event was set for the time of landfall plus six hours. This is 11:30 to 17:30 UTC. The result is Chisquare 21843.535 on 21600, for p = 0.121 and Z = 1.171 Another event of note on the 27th was Jack Layton's funeral. It overlaps with the last part of the defined event for Hurricane Irene, and could not be included in the formal series. We have however placed it in the listing of non formal analyses.
It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every "success" might be largely driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.
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