Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Hurricane center’s goal? Calm before the storm
New features will help optimize preparations
MIAMI — Everybody in South Florida becomes a storm watcher when a hurricane threatens, and for good reason.
We flock to the National Hurricane Center’s website, where the complexities of tropical weather are distilled into those familiar text advisories, graphics and maps — we’ve all studied the famous cone at one point — that seek to accomplish one goal: helping residents be as prepared as possible.
This year, those informational products, as staffers at the hurricane center call them, are getting a face-lift. The maps of the tropics, for example, which have long looked as if they had been born at the dawn of the internet, will now look sleeker, with cleaner fonts and softer colors.
There are also some new warning procedures and graphics that will debut when this year’s Atlantic hurricane season gets underway June 1.
“We were trying to deal with what we thought were gaps in the program,” said James Franklin, branch chief of the center’s Hurricane Specialist Unit.
In an interview at the hurricane center, Franklin showed the products set to debut this year. They include: Storm surge watches
and warnings. As part of an effort to emphasize the fact that storm surge — or water inundation as a result of a storm — kills more people than any other storm-related hazard, the hurricane center will release these alerts when rising water levels pose a threat to coastal and inland areas.
“Storm surge kills more people than any other hazard, and yet hurricane warnings are put up for wind,” Franklin said. “The wind threat and the surge threat doesn’t always occur at the same time, doesn’t always occur at the same place, and the response is different.”
Watches, warnings and advisories for potential tropical cyclones. In the past, such alerts could only be issued after a tropical cyclone — a depression, storm, or hurricane — had formed. The main reason is to give more people time to prepare.
“This addresses another gap that we had where storms could form very close to the coast and we would need to put up a warning with only 6 or 12 or 18 hours’ notice, [and] people [do] not have enough time to prepare.”
Graphics that show the earliest expected time of arrival of tropical stormforce winds to a threatened area. This is new and is being tried on an experimental basis. The goal is to emphasize to residents what time they should have their storm preparations completed.
“We want people to make smarter decisions, so the time of arrival graphic lets people know how much time they have to prepare,” Franklin explained. “They can better plan what they need to do, they now know when they need to get it done by, make sure the preparations are done before the strong winds arrive.”
In addition to the upgrade to the overall look of the tropical cyclone graphics, the cone graphic will now include a yellow area that shows the extent of where tropical storm-force
winds are located. This addition will emphasize to residents that tropical storm-force winds can occur well outside the cone.
“You can see that the strong winds, the tropicalstorm winds, go well outside the cone,” Franklin says, pointing to a map of last year’s then-Tropical Storm Hermine, which shows a large yellow area protruding out from the cone as the storm churned in the Gulf of Mexico. It would later become the first hurricane to make landfall in Florida — near Tallahassee — since 2005.
“Don’t look at the cone, don’t make a decision on being safe or not safe depending on whether you’re in or outside of the cone,” Franklin said.
For more information, go to the National Hurricane Center’s website at hurricanes.gov.