USA: How to better explain hurricane threats? Barry showed 'good' and 'bad' of storm risk assessment

By Mark Schleifstein

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[Hurricane] Barry presented a textbook example, [meteorologist Frank] Marks said, of the improvements made in hurricane forecasting over the past 20 years. Predicting where the eye of a storm will go and when it will arrive has improved dramatically. Forecasts of intensity have not improved nearly as much.

The improved accuracy, meanwhile, comes with a new problem: The public — and sometimes local emergency officials — often don’t understand where a storm’s worst effects will occur, how widespread the effects will be, or how long a storm will remain dangerous after its eye has moved inland, Marks said.

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“I think Barry kind of showed the good and the bad,” Marks said in a recent telephone interview. “With that system, the models were actually picking it up almost a week ahead of time and saying there was going to be something dropping out of Georgia into the Gulf that would become pretty consequential, a hurricane. That was pretty amazing.”

The bad, Marks said, was the difficulty in getting people to understand how Barry’s slow intensification made it hard to say when and where the worst rainfall would take place. Other challenges: The storm’s potential to intensify and organize led to a scary storm surge forecast for an unprecedentedly high Mississippi River in New Orleans, and its failure to spin up then caused that threat to disappear.

Marks is most interested in a new effort to improve the way forecasters use social and behavioral science to communicate risk to the public. 

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