The Cone of Uncertainty
By Sarah F. Hill
The first of the speakers at the TAMEST Natural Hazards Summit: Responding to and Mitigating the Impacts was Michael Coyne, Regional Director, National Weather Service, Southern Region. His presentation was entitled, “Advances in Hurricane and Weather Forecasting.” The prediction models used in hurricane tracking are getting so sophisticated that people are perceiving them as 100 percent accurate. This is a problem, because, according to Coyne, while many advances have been made, there is still a significant way to go in this area of prediction.
So, why do we still have loss of lives from these mega-storms– why don’t people evacuate? “The meteorological field is just like the medical field in that it is plagued by misinformation,” he explained. There is also a phenomenon where people disregard the so-called “cone of uncertainty.” When people see the ‘cone’ they determine the probability is low that they would really caught in the storm surge. Plus, some people just do not have trust in science and its predictions.
Then there are people who simply can’t afford or find a way to evacuate, and they truly believe staying put will be less of a threat than leaving. That’s when the National Weather Service decided to use very specific language to describe hurricanes. Referring to the storm as an “unsurvivable event” -- when that is in fact the case -- is one way the National Weather Service ramps up the evacuation process. Working with social scientists, the National Weather Service aims to understand more fully how people perceive confusing and conflicting information like spaghetti plots and other media/data when the information being given is changeable in nature, like the “wobbling of a storm -- off-path,” as Coyne put it.
Part II of the TAMEST Natural Hazards Summit will take place on May 16, 2022, in Lubbock, Texas. The session, presented by the National Wind Institute (NWI) at Texas Tech University, will take place at Texas Tech University’s International Cultural Center (601 Indiana Avenue, Lubbock, TX 79409).