Hurricane Warnings Have Got To Change

People who work with me will tell you I believe the on-air narrative is much more imoprtant than the actual numbers I put on the screen.

Hurricane Katia is a Category 3 storm. Big deal. The fish don’t care. Katia looks to be a threat only to surfers and shipping and hopefully they’ll steer clear. The Hurricane Center might call it a “major hurricane,” but that’s only of academic concern.

This is as good a time as any to talk hurricanes, hurricane warnings and hurricane classifications. We are not well served as things currently stand!

We don’t see hurricanes that often, so maybe it’s better to use a snow example. The warning for a one inch snowfall in Birmingham, AL should be very different than for Buffalo with that same inch. Birmingham will be impacted in a very different way.

A tropical storm in the Northeast is different than the same tropical storm bearing down on Tampa.

They have more experience in Florida, but they also have less susceptible infrastructure. Palm trees have much less wind resistance than the deciduous trees we have here in the Northeast. They don’t have their power lines surrounded by branches and leaves.

Florida is also more able to handle lots of water. Many of our Hurricane Irene problems happened inland along rivers swollen with 6-9″ of rain.

The watches and warnings we received for Irene just weren’t appropriate because they dwelled on a wind figure that wasn’t all that important to us. It was easy for the public to dismiss winds they’ve seen do little elsewhere. Much more important was the duration of the easterly winds pushing water into Long Island Sound and the rain.

People who work with me will tell you I believe the on-air narrative is much more imoprtant than the actual numbers I put on the screen. That’s true for tropical weather prediction as well. That’s what I tried to drive home last weekend.

I’m not sure how the warnings should be changed, but I will spend a lot of time over the next few months thinking about it. They’ve got to make the storm’s effect the primary story and play down numbers that are little understood by the public.

15 thoughts on “Hurricane Warnings Have Got To Change”

  1. People will never stop looking at the wind and rain numbers, but how about if a “color code” something like Homeland Security used, except with more colors? The “color” of the warning could take into account the wind and rain, but also the many other factors that determine how bad the storm will be.

  2. “I’m not sure how the warnings should be changed, but I will spend a lot of time over the next few months thinking about it.”

    This post is pretty vacuous. Not only have you not suggested alternatives, but you haven’t made your point either.

    “They’ve got to make the storm’s effect the primary story and play down numbers that are little understood by the public.”

    What does this mean? What about Irene’s “effect” was not well explained? The truth is that the largely undereducated, dare I say, uneducated, public is being spoon fed what the effects are in an already digestable format. Perhaps when media personalities no longer feel the need to trump up what is already being clearly explained, there won’t be as much confusion as you claim there is.

    1. The point of Science, it question Our selves and find the results, Geoff is a man of Science. This post is an example of why I love watching geoff. He will question our current understanding to see if there is a better way to explain what happening he will do his best to inform, educate, arrouse your interest, make sure you are getting the best information you can have, your part is to take what he is telling you, and do what you need to do to deal with what is happening as it affects you. How he does his job, is what we LOVE ABOUT HIM.

  3. The whole saffir simpson scale needs to be reworked. It needs to incorporate not only wind speed but both estimated surge and rain fall. Irene was a great example. Sure it was only a high end tropical storm when it reached the north east but the surge was typical of what , a high end cat 2? Also look at Katrina, made landfall as a cat 3, but the surge wiped out NOLA.

  4. “The whole saffir simpson scale needs to be reworked. It needs to incorporate not only wind speed but both estimated surge and rain fall”.

    They did this already, but backed off, again, because the public would choke on it. It’s less about coming up with a more meantingful scale than it is about how much smaller the public needs its vegetables cut up at dinnertime. The scale they came up with is called the (IKE) Integrated Kinetic Energy scale.

    Here’s an average, run-of-the-mill MSM article about it.

    http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/hurricanes/story/2011/08/New-hurricane-scale-puts-more-focus-on-storm-surge/49958782/1

  5. “The watches and warnings we received for Irene just weren’t appropriate because they dwelled on a wind figure that wasn’t all that important to us. It was easy for the public to dismiss winds they’ve seen do little elsewhere. Much more important was the duration of the easterly winds pushing water into Long Island Sound and the rain.”

    Sure, it is easy for the public to dismiss wind figures, and other impacts may be more relevant. However, that doesn’t make the watches and warnings “inappropriate”. In fact, public Advisory Watches and Warnings already go well out of their way to specify Hazards Affecting Land in specific detail, including Storm Surge, Rainfall, Wind, Tornadoes, and Surf. If the public isn’t grasping these facts, the media is failing to parse the information for them (or if no handholding is required, then the public isn’t doing it themselves). What you’re asking to be included already is included!

    Example:

    BULLETIN
    HURRICANE IRENE INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 32A
    NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL092011
    800 AM EDT SUN AUG 28 2011

    http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2011/al09/al092011.public_a.032.shtml?

    For all archives on Irene:

    http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2011/refresh/IRENE+shtml/120913.shtml?

  6. With all due respect, I don’t need to understand the numbers: That’s why I watch Geoff! It’s Geoff’s job to explain the weather to me in a way I can understand. And as far as I’m concerned, we had plenty of warning about storm surge with Irene, thanks to Geoff and his colleagues. People were warned that the rivers and streams were already swollen and the storm surge and astronomical high tide would cause flooding. At least, all of the weather news I watched warned people. You guys did a great job of interpreting all of the factors and warning people to shore up their homes, that the flooding would be the dangerous.

  7. “Hurricane Katia is a Category 3 storm. Big deal. The fish don’t care. Katia looks to be a threat only to surfers and shipping and hopefully they’ll steer clear. The Hurricane Center might call it a “major hurricane,” but that’s only of academic concern.”

    Academic concern. Is that because it doesn’t affect mainland USA or our interests like our island getaways? She IS a big deal, and she NEEDS to be watched. And not just by forecasters.

    I heard too many of your colleagues use the word “only” or “just” as Irene neared. She was “only” a category 1, she was “just” a tropical storm. Once that word was used, I saw friends back off on their preparedness and wonder while we ran around getting the generator ready, etc. After all, it was “only” a tropical storm.

  8. I had the very same thought as Irene was coming up the East Coast a few weeks ago. A Cat 1 hurricane impacting New York City & coastal Connecticut is a completely different scenario than the same magnitude storm (by NHC standards) moving toward the coast of Texas, which is less densely populated and has dealt with these type storms more frequency over time (thus conditioning the public, infrastructure and surrounding natural elements — trees, etc).

    There needs to be a system to categorize tropical storm systems for scientific purposes; then, there needs to be a type of threat level that is relayed to the public.

    In the current world of global media, there is a large portion of the public that over simplifies what they are hearing on national outlets, and they rationalize that Cat 1 storm in one region will be relatively the same as a Cat 1 storm in another.

    I loved Peter’s line: “it is about how much smaller the public needs its vegetables cut up at dinnertime” …. he’s right. The public is ingesting information that was not accessible before the Internet or cable TV. It used to be much more localized. A large population in one part of the country never witnessed how another part of the country was affected by a (scientifically) similar event.

    In this new era, we need a system from the NHC to break down for the public “how is this going to affect my area”, but still in a scale that is in a easily recognizable form and is uniform.

    There seems to be a communication gap between NOAA and the public, and the media can only do so much to bridge that gap (especially when the public can go directly to the NHC site and see the raw information for themselves).

    You’re right that if the type of snow storm that impacts New England frequency were to hit coastal Texas, it would be paralyzing to those people. There aren’t plows in Texas. Public utilities are more vulnerable to the weight of ice, etc. If the NWS classifies a snow storm in New England and Texas the same though, how are people to know the difference?

    Maybe the NHC should categorize hurricanes for the public on the amount of potential damage from a storm, similarly to the Enhanced Fujita scale. Given the amount of lead-up time before a hurricane makes landfall, the NHC could use a similar system to predict storm impact as opposed to assessing storm impact after the event.

    One last point. Tropical Storm Lee has caused many wildfires and flooding on the coast. We think of tropical storms as even less threats as hurricanes, right?! Many wildfires in East Texas over the past few days have exploded because of the winds of Lee. Lee’s slow movement through the south has caused lots of flooding. Yet, we classify the system as a ‘tropical storm’, based on wind speed. We miss the bigger picture by doing this.

    The geography and other factors play a big roll as to how a storm system will impact an area. When categorizing tropical storm systems for public consumption, we have to stop saying “what they tend to do anywhere”, and start saying “what are they likely to do here”. A “1-5 anywhere in this hemisphere” scale just doesn’t cut it.

  9. There already is a great system in place. That system is called COMMON SENSE. Listen to all the information you can get, digest it, and use your brains! I was in the dark for nine days and did just fine!

    Thanks Geoff for all your good work!

  10. Geoff,
    I just wanted to say I enjoyed seeing you on the telethon,
    did not realize until I turned it on it was going to be so short.
    I look forward to seeing it every year.

  11. In a way, Irene reminds me of Hurricane Diane in 1955. It came ashore in NC as a category 1 and lost strength as it moved inland. But it dumped so much rain in CT that town and cities were flooded by small rivers and streams that had never been a problem. My parents took me to see the aftermath in Putnam, and I was one scared kid! It was because of Diane that a flood control dam was built north of the city to control the Quinebaug River. Having experienced category 2 Hurricane Carol the previous year, a storm that was only a tropical storm didn’t seem to be a big deal, but it certainly turned out to be for the people of Winsted and Putnam. I wonder if all that rain have been as devastating in Florida or the Gulf Coast.

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