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. Read more

Hurricane Season in New Orleans

Hurricane season is a very strange time in New Orleans. Before Hurricane Katrina, we were an almost arrogant people, ones who defied the hurricane Gods to blow our way. In just the year before Katrina, we watched as Hurricane Ivan turned at the gates and headed toward Mississippi.

Now, we are a panicky people. Every strong gust of wind that blows in the ocean is greeted with a watchful eye. For six months out of the year, we go from being firemen, lawyers and accountants to padding our resumes with “amateur meteorologist”. A trip to Burget King is more likely to yield advice on high pressure systems and prevailing currents than it is ketchup packets.

It’s a strange ritual in the “New” New Orleans. We sit around, anxiously waiting for updates from the National Hurricane Center, making note of even the slightest shift in tracking or forecasting. If the forecast doesn’t reach land, we trace the line with our finger, trying to see by hand what billion-dollar computers can’t, the future.

It is an exercise in futility and we know it. For one, the hurricanes never stay on their track. Katrina, for example, overshot its original estimations by at least a time zone. Second, even if the storm did follow its “predestined” track, there would be nothing we could do about it. Read more