For those like me who’ve lived most of our life in The Sunshine State, June 1st is a rite of passage and you may want to just skip this post. But for those of you that are new to the Sunshine State, who perhaps moved here during Covid lockdowns elsewhere, Hurricane season is something totally new.

With a tropical system that has been designated PTC-1/Invest91L, and which will be named Alex (and is the Caribbean-based remnants of the Agatha, a Pacific storm that impacted Mexico last week), certain to impact Florida this weekend, now is the time to learn some basics.

• While the National Hurricane Center (NHC) does a great job of forecasting DO NOT FOCUS ON THE CENTER OF THE PROJECTED PATH OR THE CONE. Bad weather can happen outside the cone, and the forecast track is an average of multiple models, many of which folks like me know how to get access to.
• Several computer models are used by the NHC, but the two most accurate tend to be the GFS and Euro models. I usually focus on these two.
• Storm projections from the NHC tend to be highly accurate in terms of path but often way off in terms of intensity. The reason is the science of forecasting intensity isn’t quite as advanced in 2022 as the forecasting of a path. Still more or less, the NHC gets it right.
• Weaker storms tend to be less concentrated, so bad weather often is much more geographically spread out, but the weather and winds of course is not as bad as in strong storms, which have tighter bands of circulation and a smaller, but more intense wind field.
• Having a steady supply of bottled drinking water and canned goods in your residence is a MUST. If you don’t have that go out and get stocked up before 3 pm on Friday if you live at any point on the peninsula south of Orlando. Just in case.

We’ll keep our readers updated on this system as events warrant.