Hurricane Center offers tools, but focus should be on the big picture

As hurricane season opens, an array of new tools will improve forecasters’ ability to tell us when and where we can expect the arrival of the storm’s violence.

But officials at the National Hurricane Center caution against over-reliance on the details of all this new information, fearing it could bring false comfort.

The famous cone of uncertainty, also known to storm-jaded Floridians as the cone of death and cone of terror, has shrunk this season, reflecting continued improvement in predicting the path of the storm. But the cone only indicates the likely path of the storm’s center; there’s still danger to communities outside the cone.

“The impacts could be two or three hundred miles away from the cone,” Ken Graham, director of the National Hurricane Center, said on Friday, the official start of hurricane season. “Away from that hurricane you could still get storm surge. You could still get heavy rain. You could still get tornadoes and winds. We have to keep talking about that because it isn’t about the cone.”

With airplanes, satellites, computer models and squads of forecasters to make sense of the data, we’ve come a long way from the days when a hurricane could loom suddenly off the coast and devastate a community. Today, anyone can go on the National Hurricane Center’s web site and observe for days as patches of stormy weather organize themselves into tropical storms or hurricanes and drift toward Florida and the Caribbean.

Anyone who has been through a hurricane season has seen the cone move a bit north or south with each new advisory, with every update appearing to place some cities in danger and leave others out of it. But Michael Brennan, branch chief of the hurricane center’s Hurricane Specialist Unit, urged residents to avoid focus-