The season officially starts today. In an interview with Bill Read director of the National Hurricane Center
“The hurricane center is changing how it presents the threat of storm surge. A new graphic will show how deep the water could get inland, instead of just the estimated storm surge at sea level.
…The other thing we're doing is the probability of storm surge, in an elevation sense. … Say your street elevation is 8 feet above sea level and you want to know the chance of it exceeding 8 feet. Punch in the number and a map will come up along the coast showing the probability of 8 feet of storm surge….
…That's where we've gotten into trouble, using (the Saffir-Simpson) scale for what we think the surge is. When we have a very large storm like Ike, the values go above what the suggested range is. A very small storm like Charley, they go below. Even worse than that, it varies from coast to coast. If you get the exact same meteorology storm as Ike hitting in Texas, getting 16 feet above sea level, and run that into Daytona Beach, you're probably going to get around 6 or 7 feet. It's a totally different problem. In the advisories, the Saffir-Simpson scale will still be in there, and the advisories will still depict the storm surge that's expected, we're just not going to have those tables that tie the two together.
…We are looking into (Twitter). We haven't figured exactly what yet, but maybe we'll push out the headline portion and "go to the Web site hurricane.gov to get full details on the advisory." Fortunately, it's a longer-fuse problem with hurricanes than tornadoes, where seconds count. We have time on our side, so I see that as a potential avenue for getting the word out. We're investigating what it would take to pull that off. We're doing podcasts, both audio and video this year.”
Photo credit NOAA
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