Cone of Stupidity

If you live in New Orleans or any place else along a cost potentially impacted by tropical storms, you need no definition for what the forecasters call the “Cone of Uncertainty”.

For those who have never had the good fortune of a rushed evacuation from the latest “Mother of All Storms” allow me to take a moment and explain.

When a hurricane or other tropical storm is out in the ocean, the nice people at the National Hurricane Center do their best to try and predict where it is going to go. They use all kinds of computer models, forecasts, voodoo magic and dart throwing to come up with a forecasted track, meaning line.

They try to predict where the storm will be in roughly five days and make the best guess they can. However, they admit they aren’t very good at this and that nature has a way of making them look like idiots. So, they hedge their best some and create what they call a “Cone of Uncertainty” that goes out from either side of the track.

Since they are pretty good at the 12-24 hour range, the cone starts off very narrow but, by day 5, grows to approximately 350 miles on either side, meaning 700 miles across.

Now, that really isn’t that bad. If you’re within 350 miles of a big hurricane, you’re going to feel it. So anyone within the cone should be paying really close attention. At worst, the storm could make it personal and hit them directly, at best they’ll need to reschedule their boat race and bar-b-que.

Useful it may be at times, I’ve undertaken the decision to, in my household, rename this aforementioned cone the “Cone of Stupidity”. Why? I’ll explain.

Cone of Cluelessness

The problem with the Cone of Stupidity is that, for most storms, it is completely meaningless. The 700-mile swath at day five is wide enough to easily engulf everything from Panama City, FL to Houston, TX, but it is is still wrong a high percentage of the time.

Take Hurricane Ike for example. When Ike was in the ocean, and many New Orleanians were in hiding, it was supposed to follow Hanna up the eastern coast. That didn’t happen.

Then it was supposed to go up the western side of Florida, eventually landing in the panhandle. That didn’t happen.

Then it was supposed to hit New Orleans or just a bit west, similar to Gustav. That didn’t happen.

Then, suddenly, the track made a jump. Ike was to take a hard turn and land at the Texas/Mexico border. That didn’t happen either.

Finally, they settled on the track of Ike hitting right around Galveston, which is pretty much how it went down. By that point, the storm was less than 72 hours out.

By the time Ike’s reign of terror over the Gulf of Mexico was over, literally every coastal town was in the Cone of Stupidity for at least one moment. That is everything from Key West, FL to Brownsville, TX. That’s a whopping 1700 mile drive.

The question becomes, what good does this do? It resulted in the the keys being evacuated so they weren’t inconvenienced with a windy day. Gustav evacuees didn’t come home after the storm had passed. And Galveston still only had a two days of mandatory evacuation time.

Great work guys.

The end result is that millions were spooked needlessly and those who needed to get out didn’t have enough time to do so. The Cone of Stupidity hurt far more people than it helped and the National Hurricane Center (NHC) was powerless to do anything about it.

Sympathy for the Devil

Some might take all of this as me bashing the NHC, but that is not my goal. They do the best job they can. It isn’t their fault nature is less predictable than my ex-girlfriends even their best guesses and computer models can’t predict her next move.

The only people I hold accountable when they can’t predict a hurricane are those that claim to speak for God. Us mortals do the best we can, but we can’t crack mother nature’s code.

That being said, the NHC does sometimes get it right. They were dead on with Gustav at five days out (though they were very wrong about the intensity, something they admit to not being good at). However, with Gustav, they were aided by clear steering currents and a stable weather picture. With Ike, they were effectively on their own.

However, if you read the NHCs discussions, you can get a feeling for their level of certainty. Those of us who read the reports, listened to weathermen and followed the situation closely knew the NHC was just guessing.

However, it is kind of a sad day when you’re getting better information about a hurricane track from your TV Weather Guy than your own government. But that’s a story for another day.

The problem is that the NHC feels the need to make these neat images every 6 hours that show the Cone of Stupidity. They want to make it easy to understand and don’t give themselves the wiggle room they need to admit when they don’t know.

Though I agree it is better to scare people needlessly than to not warm them adequately, the current system manages to do both.

The NHC needs to make a change in the way it reports potential tracks. That is, until they get better at making them.

Fixing The Problem

The solution is simple. The NHC should not feel the need to dumb down the information it gets. It should not feel forced to predict out further than it has good information.

If patterns are stable and they know where the storm is going, they should have a narrow cone. If they don’t have any bloody clue, they should say so.

Furthermore, why aren’t they allowed to talk about difference scenarios and, instead, focus on the one that they see as most likely. Weathermen talk about scenarios constantly. Why doesn’t the NHC?

Also, why don’t the talk more about the models and present that information? Though they are wildly in accurate, they usually indicate a few possible tracks and their own path is usually based in large part upon them.

No, the NHC is content on presenting one track, with a bright line and a neat cone and then jerking that cone around for every little shift. Like a maniac threatening a crowd with a gun, they point the bullet at everyone until half the nation is ducking for cover.

But even if they feel the need to run with this “one track” system, there is no reason to force the Cone of Stupidity to be 700 miles wide at day five. It may need to be much larger if there is a lot of uncertainty or much smaller if they feel comfortable they have it.

The NHC has been restrained to the point that its Cone of Stupidity is almost meaningless and those of us that have to watch it would rather listen to our local weathermen than the advice of the Federal agency dedicated to tracking this stuff.

Conclusions

Having worked for the Federal government, I know well how stupid these regulations can be. I feel very bad for the good people at the NHC as I am sure they are even more frustrated than I.

Still, the agency that is literally responsible for predicting some of the worst of nature’s fury cannot be bound by artificial rules. The NHC needs to be honest with us and it needs to be able to present the information to us in a clear, accurate manner.

Sadly, I don’t see that happening and, even as this hurricane season seems to be winding down, I’m already sweating for the next one.

However, much of that is due to the fact that, at the helm, will be a hamstrung NHC and their completely asinine Cone of Stupidity.