The iconic cone graphic used by the National Hurricane Center to depict the potential path of tropical systems will undergo a noticeable change for the upcoming hurricane season.
The cone will be deemphasized over land in the continental US, with more emphasis being placed on expected impacts by showing tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings instead. This means you’ll see active tropical alerts instead of a cone where applicable over land.
Watches and warnings used to only be shown alongside the cone “in a line along the coastline of the affected area,” NHC director Michael Brennan told CNN. Now, the alerts are taking “precedence over the cone,” and “will be predominant on the graphic,” NHC spokesperson Maria Torres told CNN.
It’s good that experts want to de-emphasize a prediction view that is simple but potentially misleading in its simplicity, and replace it with something that more accurately reflects the uncertain reality.
But people want simple, and don’t want uncertainty.
So I expect, if the experts aren’t providing the “cone,” viewer demand will lead to the media outlets making the cone themselves, almost certainly with less expertise and worse alignment to reality, and then idiot viewers will incorrectly blame the expert forecasters for a bad prediction.
My thoughts are that an article about something graphical that doesn’t graphically illustrate what they’re talking about is kind of a waste of the internets it was printed on
Part of me feels like it’s pandering to the stupid and uninformed. If there’s a hurricane in the Gulf, you go look at the track every day or even more often than that, and see where it moved to. For example, I’ll bet that Hurricane Marco’s cone three days before landfall was significantly different than the one five days before. They update the cone often to show changes in position and conditions, etc…
And the cone itself is an indication of uncertainty- they have the predicted track of where they think it will go, and the cone shows where it could go. The wider the cone, the more uncertain the prediction is- that’s why it’s a cone. It shows uncertainty over time. Again, you have to keep up with it, but if you do, it’s a pretty handy representation of what’s going on.
So if you’re worried about it, you keep checking- you don’t look at it five or six days out and then just ignore it and be surprised when it doesn’t follow that specific track.
Otherwise, part of me wonders if their changes are because it makes it harder to print out and Sharpie it up.