Hurricane center to track storms before they form

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – As if we aren’t jittery enough when tropical storms head our way, now we can watch disturbances approach.

Starting July 1, the National Hurricane Center will put on its website colorful graphics that identify systems that could grow into storms and where they might go over five days.

The graphics, called swaths, resemble color-coded cones of uncertainty. The idea isn’t to scare people but rather make sure they aren’t taken by surprise if a tropical system develops close to land, said James Franklin, the center’s top hurricane specialist.

“We want to give people a heads-up that there might be a disturbance out there worth paying attention to,” he said.

Similar to the Transportation Security Administration’s color-coded terrorism threat scale, the swaths will be colored yellow, orange and red to designate low, medium and high odds of a disturbance strengthening into a depression, storm or hurricane.

“Hopefully, people will understand that a red swath over Florida means, yeah, I ought to pay attention to this,” Franklin said.

Although all the details have yet to be worked out, the swaths will be available under the “Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook” link under the main map on the hurricane center’s online site, nhc.noaa.gov.

If you click on a particular swath, it will be enlarged and accompanied by a text explanation.

“It’s going to be kind of interactive,” hurricane center spokesman Dennis Feltgen said. “You’ll have to move your mouse and click.”

Until this year, storm watchers had to rely on models – the spaghetti-like predictions of storm paths – to see if a disturbance might be headed their way. The swaths will provide a forecaster’s best estimate of a system’s path.

“The forecaster has experience in what he sees in the structure and organization of a system, and the quality of the environment ahead of it,” Franklin said. “We hope the swaths dissuade some folks from focusing on computer models for tropical forecasts.”

The swaths, being offered on an experimental basis this year, are an extension of the hurricane center’s two-day tropical weather outlook.