Bryan Norcross' Official Blog

Hurricane Sandy Assessment – The Rest of the Story

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:03:00 GMT

NOAA’s self-assessment of how they did during Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy came out last week – a thoughtful and compelling piece of work produced in a compressed amount of time. The document goes on for 50+ pages, plus a summary (link below). It’s full of evidence, analysis, and conclusions that anyone involved with communications during hurricanes should read and take to heart. Dr. Louis Uccellini, the new top guy at the National Weather Service, has alread...
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Sandy Assessment Ready to Go

Wed, 2 Jan 2013 14:21:00 GMT

NOAA’s Hurricane Sandy service assessment finally gets underway next week. And, not to put too fine a point on it, they need to get it right. The agency, which includes the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, has had a shaky few years, but this is a chance to move past the missteps and misfires and make a big difference. The bottom line: the system we use to package and communicate hurricane-threat information doesn’t work. There are...
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Unraveling the Sandy Storm-Surge Forecast

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 04:36:00 GMT

The track forecast for Sandy has been widely acclaimed as a success of modern meteorology, and rightly so. The advance notice provided by the European Center’s ECMWF computer forecast model was truly remarkable. And the National Hurricane Center’s forecast showed an alarming threat to the Northeast 4 1/2 days before the worst of Sandy’s surge came ashore. But the little-discussed National Weather Service storm-surge forecast for New York and New Jersey was ...
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NOAA's Small Step and Big Miss

Thu, 6 Dec 2012 04:28:00 GMT

NOAA confirmed and then unconfirmed on Wednesday that they decided to redefine a Hurricane Warning… slightly. A report issued after last week’s annual NOAA Hurricane Meeting – where they review the past hurricane season and vote on improved policies – includes the new language. It defines a Hurricane Warning as:

An announcement that sustained winds of 74 mph or higher are expected somewhere within the (hurricane warning) area in association with...
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Time to Fix Emergency Communications

Mon, 3 Dec 2012 04:01:00 GMT

The hurricane season is over, so the fix-the-system season can begin. There are a lot of tropical takeaways from the last few months, but my biggest one is that the system we have in the United States for communicating a serious hurricane threat is drastically and dangerously dysfunctional.

The communications system is so fundamentally broken that the fact of a clear and present threat to New York City – the most important city in the country – d...
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