Some closing advice on storm watching and scare mongering

I have been stunned at the explosion of fake graphics and viral false rumors about hurricanes this year, especially during Milton. This is a truly disturbing trend that is adding a lot of unnecessary fear and angst to hurricane season, and I spent an inordinate amount of time during the last two storms debunking a lot of garbage and trying to calm down people who got scared by this crap.

There are only three official, reliable sources of hurricane/tropical cyclone information in the US: the US National Hurricane Center (link) based in Miami covers the Atlantic, East Pacific (off of Mexico/Central America). The Central Pacific Hurricane Center, also part of the National Weather Service and available at that same link, is based in and covers Hawaii. The rest of the world is covered (for US purposes) by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (link), a joint US Navy and Air Force command. In the case of the US, you can get detailed local information by going to the main National Weather Service site (link), click on your location (or enter your zip code in the upper left corner) and get specific information for your location. Look for the “weather briefing” during hazardous weather events, it’s a great resource.

If you want to argue these agencies, with their highly professional staffs, are not giving you the truth or are hiding something, I can’t help you: you are delusional. They aren’t perfect, but they are among the best in the world at what they do. They should be your first (and probably last) source of information.

Sad to say but you need to be suspicious of any graphics you don’t get directly from those sites, even if they look official. There is a graphic going around that claims to be of “Hurricane Nadine”. Even though it is illegal to modify a NOAA graphic without clearly labeling it as a modification, somebody took a Helene graphic and modified it, and it scared a lot of people. There is no Nadine yet (although a storm is forming in the far East Atlantic that might become Nadine). So check if something doesn’t look right or doesn’t match what you are hearing from reliable sources, not what some dude on Tik-Tok says.

You also have to be very careful with third party graphics that reformat Weather Service graphics (as the recent dust-up with a local TV station showed). Here is the official “Tropical Weather Outlook” graphic from NHC:

… and here is my version of it that takes their data and puts it over the current GOES East satellite image:

If you compare the two they are showing the same data, although the Enki graphic is using the NOAA Satellite Analysis Branch enhancement curve on live satellite data received here in my office to emphasize convective cloud cover (in red). My version also labels storms that are still being tracked but for which NHC is no longer issuing advisories, like Milton. It pays to compare graphics and commentary you see on third party sites – even (especially?) media sources – with the official graphics to see if they are adding value, or just creating confusion and clickbaiting.

I heard a lot about weather control this time for some reason. Advocates for this bonkers theory are confusing weather modification attempts with weather control. Yes, there have been attempts to modify weather, mostly rain and cloud related. Cloud seeding and other attempts to modify local conditions have been used operationally with varying degrees of success – often with unintended consequences. These are all small scale interventions. There is no comparison between enhancing rain over a few dozen (even hundred) square miles and turning a hurricane or making them stronger or weaker.

I also heard frequently (including from the local morning radio clown in Savannah) the utterly silly argument that “if we can’t control the weather, we can’t influence climate, therefore climate change is a hoax.” These are totally different physical processes, at totally different forcings and time scales. I can’t pick up a car. But if I push on it and start it rocking, I might be able to get it moving. Same me, same car, different process. So, yes, we are changing the Earth’s climate, but we can’t really control the weather. Two different things.

So as with every other aspect of our increasingly contaminated information spaces, you have to be very careful and skeptical, keeping in mind Carl Sagan’s advice that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, along with the sage advice from the 1990’s documentary series The X Files: Trust No One. But, as noted above, at least for weather hazards, there is a trusted, reliable source: the National Weather Service.