Forecasters working to reduce unnecessary hurricane evacuations

The National Hurricane Center is getting ready for the start of hurricane season on Thursday, with the expectation that this year will be a relatively average year for tropical activity.

“We want to be as accurate as possible,” said Robbie Berg, a senior hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center. “We also want to make sure that we're not over-evacuating too many people because unfortunately, we have seen deaths in cases where people are trying to evacuate their homes and maybe it's just too much stress on them, the heat can be bad, and so we lose people that way as well.

Berg has experienced how much storm surge forecasting has changed since he started at the National Hurricane Center in 2002. “We take the perfect forecast and we assume that the track could shift, it could get bigger, it could get stronger, and all of those simulations get kind of put in together as a family of storms,” Berg said. “And then we can more accurately assess the risk of storm surge, not just assuming a perfect forecast, but what are the different possibilities that storm could do?”

“I mean, we are concerned about people that may not understand hurricanes moving to the state, maybe not being prepared, however, I would say there's still a group of people that come that might be scared of hurricanes because they've never experienced it before. And so they may still take precautions,” Berg said. “I think part of the problem we're seeing is that people who have experienced storms in the past may not have actually experienced the worst of those storms,” he said.

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