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Hurricane Center Makes Web Site More User-Friendly

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By NEIL JOHNSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 8, 2008

TAMPA - This year, the National Hurricane Center has gussied up its Internet home page and tweaked a highly popular graphic to show people how likely weather systems are to grow into tropical cyclones.

The revamped home page at the hurricane center site will give folks a quick view of storms and potential storms in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

It's an addition to make the site easier for the public to see tropical activity at a glance, center spokesman Dennis Feltgen said.

The new home page map is blank now but will show the location of tropical storms when they develop.

In addition to the home page map, the center changed what is called its Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook, which debuted last season.

The outlook shows a satellite view of areas of disturbed weather that forecasters are watching, such as areas of low pressure that have the potential to develop into storms. It includes a brief description of what the storm systems are likely to do.

The description was something like: "Shower activity extends from the northwestern Caribbean Sea across Cuba ... the Bahamas ... and into the Atlantic for a few hundred miles. Upper-level winds are unfavorable for development."

That terse, technical wording did not make it easy for the public to quickly grasp how serious a threat the storm system posed, Feltgen said.

This year's version will be color coded to show how likely forecasters think it is that a tropical storm will form.

Yellow means forecasters think there's a less than 20 percent chance of a storm forming. Orange indicates a 20 to 50 percent chance of a tropical storm forming, and red means there's a chance of more than 50 percent that the disturbed weather will become at least a tropical storm.

"It gives a little more information," Feltgen said.

In addition, the outlook will come out four times a day rather than twice a day, as it did last season. The times, 2 and 8 a.m. and 2 and 8 p.m., mean the graphic will include data from the latest possible forecast model run.

The outlook quickly became popular with the public when it appeared last season. In 2007, it received 5.6 million hits on the Web, including 1.6 million in September.

Only satellite images were more popular.

"This was a runaway number two," Feltgen said.

The center's Web site is at www.nhc.noaa.gov.

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