We are discontinuing our early December quantitative hurricane forecast for the next year … Our early December Atlantic basin seasonal hurricane forecasts of the last 20 years have not shown real-time forecast skill even though the hindcast studies on which they were based had considerable skill.
Emphasis mine. The importance of cross-validation!
This reminds me of an article I read recently (and cannot find for the life of me) about the calibration of this type of model. Essentially, the author was pointing out that the curves fitted to past data to "train" these models frequently have more degrees of freedom than there are data points in the training set. For those of you who aren't familiar with curve-fitting, this means there is literally an infinite number of curves that can be fit to the data, giving a small probability of your algorithm finding one that models the future with an ac...
From Cafe Hayek (original): Two meteorologists have announced that they will stop using certain forecast methods, even though they've used them for 20 years.
There's a correction at the end of the article, too!