[mattfm]

"Graphics like these need to be read closely and carefully. Only then can we grasp what they're really saying."

A cone showing the likely paths of the storm's eye seems like the incorrect graphic to communicate to the public. The public cares about how much rain and wind they are going to get. The take-away to me is that maybe we should just emphasize maps of expected cumulative rainfall and wind speed, and not present something that is uninformative (or prone to misinterpretation) to begin with.

[dmurray]

"expected" is perhaps the wrong metric here. There's a difference between being certain of getting 10mm of rain and 20 km/h winds, and a 10% chance of 100mm rain and 200 km/h winds, and you want people to prepare accordingly.

The thrust of the article - although it can't state it directly and frames it as a graphics/communications issue - is that more people should prepare for hurricanes, that the cost of more false positives outweighs the downsides of increased false negatives.

[lutorm]

Yes, there are wind speed probability plots that show the currently forecasted probability of getting tropical-storm, hurricane and greater-than-hurricane (don't remember) plots that are more useful for judging risk.