“…Notable exceptions include attempts to forecast frequencies and tracks of tropical cyclones. The main focus has been on North Atlantic hurricanes (Gray et al, 1992(Gray et al, , 1994Hess et al, 1995;Lehmiller et al, 1997;Mielke and Berry, 2000), but some attention has been given to the northwest Pacific (Chan et al, 1998), the southwest Indian Ocean (Jury et al, 1999b), and the southwest Pacific (Basher and Zheng, 1995). Looking beyond forecasts of seasonal conditions, very few efforts have been made to forecast climate at interannual time scales (White, 2000).…”