Hurricane Season Starts June 1st – 4 Lessons From The Coronavirus Pandemic To Apply

It comes around like clockwork every year. The start of the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1st, and many tropical meteorology experts are forecasting above-normal activity. The nation is still reeling from the public health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, which may place preparation for hurricane season into the “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it” category for many people. However, preparation is important. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 144.6 million people or about 45% of the American population live within coastal regions vulnerable to hurricanes. In the past 5 years alone, the nation has suffered through society-altering storms like Harvey, Maria, Michael, and Florence. In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, four critical lessons have been revealed to me that should be applied as hurricane season approaches.

Prepare. I live by a simple 5 P’s paradigm: “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” Warning signs were flashing for years about the threat of a pandemic of this scale. Even in the early months of the pandemic, skepticism about the virus possibly delayed actions such as social distancing measures, acquisition of testing kits, and so forth. However, I will leave those discussions for others, but there is a key lesson for hurricane season: Prepare. For hurricane preparedness week, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (FLASH) lays out a 5 step process on its website:

1. Know your evacuation zone
2. Build a disaster supply kit
3. Have an insurance check-up
4. Strengthen your home
5. Help your neighbor

These 5 steps are perfect complements to the 5 P’s.

Beware of the pseudoscience and opinion machines. Timothy Caulfield wrote a brilliant piece in Nature entitled, “Pseudoscience and COVID-19 — we’ve had enough already.” In this piece published on April 27th, he argued that the scientific community must be more proactive in speaking out against pseudoscience and myths propagating during events like the coronavirus pandemic. He basically argues that “sitting on the sidelines” as people Tweet or Facebook share wacky theories or factually-inaccurate opinions about herd immunity, influenza, and data makes scientists complicit in viral science misinformation spread. I agree and have made similar statements in the past. During hurricane season, we deal with a similar phenomenon. Social “media-rologists” (and candidly, some professionals) will share long-term model projections that are meaningless and designed to get likes, follows, and shares. Everyone has equal access to the weather model information these days, but there is not equal access in terms of the ability to interpret them and their nuances. To the untrained person on the other end of a Facebook post about a hurricane forecast, the information may look credible even if it is not or was posted without context. There are numerous credible meteorologists, news outlets and websites, but for starters, I recommend locking in NOAA’s National Hurricane Center social media and website coordinates. They are my initial go-to source for the latest information.

Don’t wishcast. As the coronavirus lockdown wears on, it is natural that people are getting a bit antsy. I am. Additionally, the economy has taken a major hit, and financial hardship is staring many people directly in the eyes. Policymakers are struggling to find the right balance between protecting lives and the economy even as experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s top infectious disease experts, continues to caution against moving too hastily. Personally, my family is still erring on the side of caution even as many states begin to trend towards normalization. Do people and leaders “wishcast” in such circumstances. As a meteorologist, I often see this in weather. People in the South often want snow so they see forecasts with a bias. As hurricane season ramps up, I recommend that you avoid the urge to “wishcast” the forecast track or intensity because of the inconvenience of having to evacuate or take other actions. Social distancing actions or evacuating from a hurricane is designed to save lives. It is actually stunning how often you see comments like, “they blew the forecast, the death numbers were lower…” Actually, the numbers were likely lower because of the actions taken.

Models have uncertainty. One of my biggest concerns during the coronavirus pandemic was the amount of misinterpretation of model data being used to forecast when deaths or hospital bed usage would peak. These models, like most, depend on assumptions, initial conditions, and model parameters. With that in mind, most experts understand that model outcomes will change or fluctuate. However, I saw a lot of people hanging on each day’s model runs and declaring the result as the gospel.

On top of the model limitations, coronavirus is a novel and not well understood. Five Thirty Eight recently published an excellent discussion of the models, their spread, and uncertainties. I like this article because it attempts to frame coronavirus modeling in terms of spread or uncertainty. We do this with hurricane forecasting too. The “cone of uncertainty” and those awful spaghetti plots try to convey that there is a range of possible model outcomes, historically or currently. Unfortunately it is human nature to want an exact answer of “where and when.” While nature lends itself to a certain amount of predictability, hurricane forecasting (and most weather predictions) require some degree of probabilistic forecasting to account for uncertainty. At least with the hurricane models, we apply “ensemble” techniques (varying the initial conditions and/or using different models) to provide a range of outcomes. I didn’t see too much of that approach with coronavirus modeling. The other difference is that hurricane models are actually solving mathematical equations representing the evolving fluid called our atmosphere. COVID-19 models were more empirical or statistical based models. For those folks comparing weather and coronavirus models, it is an apples vs, oranges comparison.

Let’s not let hurricane season slip up on us too.