Preliminary shooting star tallies and interviews with the four groups who predicted this year's Leonid meteor shower reveal that while strides were made in the young science of meteor forecasting, nobody got it right in 2001.

"Right now it looks like we all were wrong, in various degrees -- perhaps me worse than others," said Bill Cooke, a NASA scientist whose forecast for a peak in Hawaii was most unlike the other three.

Nonetheless, experts say meteor forecasting, if not perfect, is at least coming of age. The other three forecasts were not entirely off base, and without question the 2001 version of the annual event was a storm, as expected by all four research groups.

At Mt. Lemmon, Arizona, a group of experienced meteor observers, using a high-tech counting technique, gave this report: "We observed an above 'storm strength' activity level (> 1000 m/hr ZHR) from about 1000-1130 UTC."

Translation: They saw more than 1,000 meteors per hour just before dawn on Sunday, Nov. 18.

Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society and six other people used remote "smart-mice" to feed their Mt. Lemmon observations into a PC operated by James Richardson, using software developed by Morris Jones to perform real-time hourly-rate calculations from multiple observers. The work was part of a NASA-sponsored research effort at the Ames Research Center.

A group of international observers northeast of Beijing, China, counted a peak hourly rate of 2,400 shooting stars. Other skywatchers in Asia and Australia reported rates of nearly 3,000 per hour. In one of the most widely watched forecasts, however, researchers David Asher and Rob McNaught had predicted an hourly rate for the region of 8,000.

Other scientists used video cameras and radio receivers to record the event. Final and official numbers for peak hourly rates, called ZHR, may not come for weeks or months, after all the observations are sorted out and cross-checked.

But some general conclusions can be drawn.

"The rates for the Western Hemisphere were higher than expected while those for the Western Pacific were lower," said Lunsford. "The shower also produced better activity for a longer period of time than expected. At least the timing was close enough that most people were able to view the event."

Many observers reported a long peak that began after or lasted past the predicted times.

Lunsford and Rainer Arlt, an astronomer at Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam in Germany, both said that a forecast group led by Finnish scientist Esko Lyytinen was most accurate at predicting the storm. They had called for a peak of 2,000 per hour for North America.

In general, all the forecast groups seemed to do better at predicting the timing of peak activity rather than the number of shooting stars that would fill the sky during the peak, several scientists said.

"ZHR predictions are still hard to achieve," Arlt said. The difficulty is not directly the result of bad prediction models, he said, but instead is due to less than perfect data on past storms. Accounts of previous meteor showers are often drawn from newspaper articles or amateur tallies.

Arlt said forecasts for 2002, when another meteor storm is expected, will now need to be scrutinized.

Next Page: The forecasters discuss their predictions and how they did