Voices: Better hurricane forecasts have dangerous downside

MIAMI – When Bryan Norcross tells me he's worried about hurricane season, then it's time to get nervous.

I was one of the thousands of South Floridians who were glued to our flickering TVs in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew was barreling down on us. Norcross became a local legend by staying on air 23 straight hours on WTVJ Channel 4 as the storm approached. With the limited forecasting technology of the time, Norcross and his colleagues could tell us little about where exactly the Category 5 behemoth would strike.

"Until six hours or so before landfall, we really didn't know that it was going to be Miami-Dade County – it could've been Broward County, it could've been the Keys," says Norcross, describing more than 100 miles of coastline where Andrew could have hit.

The 2015 hurricane season started Monday. Officials at the National Hurricane Center showed off a slew of new forecasting technology.

The center's "Cone of Predictability," which predicts where a storm's eye will make landfall, has become 40% more refined in the past decade. Improvements in computing and satellite observations mean the cone will become more narrow, something we could've used to predict Andrew's eventual landfall 30 miles south of downtown Miami.

The center is also launching a test project to issue storm surge warnings for each storm, just as the center provides hurricane and tropical storm warnings to prepare communities for the oncoming winds. The storm surge warnings will help predict how much water is on the way, something anybody in Hurricane Sandy's path could have used in 2012.

But Norcross says the improvements in forecasting technology actually come with a disturbing downside.

"Now there's an expectation that we will know where it's going to go," says Norcross, now the senior hurricane specialist at The Weather Channel. "We have a bigger threat of the outliers, the ones that change at the last minute that, even with modern technology, we can't predict."

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate puts it more succinctly: "Technology is not all it's cracked up to be."

I've covered hurricanes all of my professional life. I zigzagged across Florida to cover the four major hurricanes that hit the state in 2004. I waded and boated through Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans in 2005. I've chased storms from the southernmost tip of Key West to the swampiest stretches of western Louisiana.

And the only thing I've learned from all those years of chasing eye walls is that, despite the advancements in forecasting technology, we still don't know exactly where they're going to hit or which part of them will cause the most damage.

Hurricane Charley was supposed to slam into downtown Tampa in 2004, but a last-minute change of direction drove it through Port Charlotte nearly 100 miles south. Hurricane Dennis made landfall near Pensacola in 2005, but it was Apalachee Bay 100 miles to the east that got nearly 10 feet of storm surge. Later that year, 8 million people evacuated Houston ahead of Hurricane Rita, which turned and came ashore in Louisiana.

That's why the start of each hurricane season gives me, and a slew of government officials and emergency responders, such heartburn. With Florida and other portions of the U.S. experiencing a historically lucky period of hurricane misses, people are already getting more complacent about the potential damage of hurricanes.

The South Florida Region of the American Red Cross has seen its volunteer pool plummet from 10,000 to 4,000 since Hurricane Wilma sloshed over Miami 10 years ago. The state has seen 1 million people move to the state since then, meaning more people have little experience with hurricanes.

And now, the technological improvements by the hurricane center threaten to give people living outside the improved Cone of Predictablity a false sense of security.

I'm not some Luddite decrying the value of technology. Anyone should applaud improvements that help our forecasters better predict where a hurricane will hit, how strong its winds will be and how much storm surge it will bring. Fugate, Norcross and officials at the hurricane center all welcome the improvements.

But they also warn of the limitations. They worry that the improved technology will lead people living outside of the predicted danger zone to tune out, to get comfortable. And now, 23 years after Andrew put an entire region on alert, Norcross worries that fewer people will be ready.

"The biggest challenge," he says, "is getting people motivated to pay attention."

Gomez is a Miami-based correspondent for USA TODAY.