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