Hurricane season is here, and so is a new arsenal of warnings
Maps modeled on Google driving directions, minus the tips on traffic and scenery, will provide estimates for the earliest or most likely arrival time for winds, something early birds and procrastinators alike can embrace. More emphasis will be placed on flooding, a hurricane's deadliest hazard, with maps inserted in advisories for the first time that let users zoom in and out to get a better idea of local threats. And advisories will now be issued once storms make landfall and winds die down but the system continues to dump heavy rain.
Social media also continues to play a bigger role at the sometimes stodgy
"We're not going to be shocking or dramatic on our social media posts. We want to be calm, cool and collected," hurricane specialist
Following the brutal 2017 hurricane season, which beat 2005 as the costliest season on record with an estimated
"It was a big humbling experience," said
The season churned out 10 hurricanes in a row, produced double the average for major hurricanes, and became the seventh most active season on record. It was also the first time in modern history that forecasters had to juggle hurricane warnings for three different storms -- Katia, Irma and Jose -- at the same time.
Showing the agency's value in the face of potentially more intense hurricanes on a warming planet could also make budget cuts politically distasteful. The Trump administration signed off on a sweeping weather forecasting improvement act last year, but has targeted the
This year, the center will roll out earlier advisories on storms that haven't yet formed but threaten land in 48 hours or less after experimenting with them last year. The first time they were used, the warnings gave the public and emergency managers nearly a day's advance warning for Tropical Storm Cindy, which went on to make landfall in
"We may be a victim of our success because I've heard suggestions that we should issue these advisories even earlier," said
For the most part, forecasters kept up with last season's frantic pace, setting a new record low for forecast errors. Because of that, this season's cone of uncertainty, which is based on the five-year average for accuracy, will shrink even more, raising concerns among forecasters that the cone will continue to be misunderstood as depicting specific hazards rather than risk. There's been some talk of removing the cone, Berg said, but it remains the most viewed graphic; after this past season, Berg looked back at what graphics were viewed by the public, and the cone still placed first by a wide margin.
"We have to do it methodically and carefully and with social science," he said. "We can't just make a change because we feel it's best for everybody."
And by adding more ways of conveying risk, they hope to persuade the public to consider warnings more broadly.
"We need to get away from the deterministic forecast and think of it as a risk framework," he said. "We may not nail the forecast, but we can give you a reasonable assumption of ... what you might expect from the storm."
Following Irma's mass evacuation on the heels of
"Emotions played a lot in Irma," she said. "We've got all these pretty graphics. But are we effectively using them?"
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