Hurricane ‘cone of terror’ gets makeover this year

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – One of the most scrutinized and feared weather graphics in history gets a makeover this year as the National Hurricane Center tries to better convey the hazards of a tropical cyclone.

A prototype five-day hurricane forecast cone – a high beam on regions targeted by tropical trouble – will debut in August with color-coded wind watches and warnings that extend inland instead of focusing solely on the coasts.

For example, although powerful Category 4 Hurricane Ian made landfall on the southwest coast of Florida in 2022 and cut a lengthy path of destruction through Central Florida, the wind watches and warnings on the cone graphic remained pinned at the coast.

The prototype cone will paint inland areas with the same color-coded watches and warnings.

“This is a step in the right direction of better understanding the risks,” said Robert Molleda, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Miami. “As we know, the impacts of a storm spread inland, so this is a truer depiction of the wind threat.”

The current iteration of the cone will continue to be used during testing of the new version.

The cone, which was first introduced in 2002, is brilliant in its graphical simplicity. But simplicity was also its downfall as people thought a hurricane’s winds, storm surge and flooding rain fit neatly inside the confines of the fuzzy white funnel, and that the tropical cyclone will track down the middle.

Instead, the center of a storm can track anywhere inside the cone with impacts far afield. Thirty-three percent of the time the storm travels outside the cone.

It’s a challenge for the National Hurricane Center, which got so frustrated by people focusing on the “skinny black line” down the center of the cone as the absolute path of the storm, it deleted the line from the main graphic.

And the prototype cone also has its limitations. Watches and warnings for flooding rains that can come with a tropical system are not shown on the graphic.

Ian brought rainfall of 10 to 20 inches in parts of Central Florida, causing flooding in Seminole, Orange, Lake, Putnam and Osceola counties. The National Hurricane Center’s report on Ian says there were 12 direct deaths attributed to freshwater flooding in central and eastern Florida.

“It doesn’t make an attempt to be comprehensive, but it does provide a better understanding of the scale of the threat,” said Fox Weather hurricane specialist Bryan Norcross about the prototype map. “It’s hard to get a broad understanding of a complex issue in one simple graphic.”

Part of the challenge has been that the local offices of the National Weather Service issue the inland watches and warnings, with the hurricane center focusing on the coasts. So, alerts are coming from two different sources on different graphics, and often at a time of heightened urgency. The new map combines the alerts.

“There is a delicate balance between showing useful information and too much information that clutters up the image,” Molleda said.

PROVIDED BY NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a new experimental hurricane cone graphic.