People still mistake a wider hurricane cone for a bigger storm, a Florida State study finds

People still read a wider hurricane forecast cone as a bigger storm, and a redesigned National Hurricane Center graphic did not fix that, according to a Florida State University study published in Weather, Climate, and Society, volume 18, issue 3. Lead author Elizabeth C. Ray, an assistant professor, and co-authors Patrick F. Merle and Bradford Johnson surveyed residents of Florida and Georgia about the experimental cone. The graphic helped them find inland watch areas but left their sense of risk unchanged.

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Ray is an assistant professor at the university, Merle is a professor and director of its School of Communication, and Johnson is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, so the work bridges risk communication and the geography of storms. Ray put the persistence of the misreading plainly: “For years, research has shown that people often mistake a wider cone for a bigger storm.”

What the cone actually measures

The cone is a statement about uncertainty in the storm’s path, not about its size. The National Hurricane Center’s own explanation of the cone says it shows “the probable track of the center of a tropical cyclone,” formed by enclosing the area swept by circles placed along the forecast track at 12 to 120 hours. Each circle is sized so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors from a five-year sample fall inside it. For 2026, based on 2021-2025 errors, the Atlantic radii run from 25 nautical miles at 12 hours to 200 nautical miles at 120 hours, so the cone widens with lead time because forecasts get less certain, whatever the storm’s dimensions.

A viewer who sees a wide cone at day five and a thin one at day one can easily take the shape for a hurricane growing. The FSU team’s finding is that the confusion survives even when the graphic gets more informative.

An experimental graphic that adds inland warnings

The version tested in the study is the one the hurricane center began issuing experimentally in 2024. According to the center’s 2024 new-products announcement, it depicts inland tropical storm and hurricane watches and warnings for the continental United States, while the operational cone shows only coastal ones. The announcement said social science research suggested the addition would help “communicate wind risk during tropical cyclone events while not overcomplicating the current version.” FSU’s news release on the study adds that the maps were compared using Hurricane Ian, from September 2022, as the example storm, with colored watch and warning areas drawn across Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, and that the new version carries a banner noting that hazardous conditions can occur outside the cone.

The center said the experimental graphic, which started on or around Aug. 15, 2024, was available on hurricanes.gov for both full and intermediate advisories, and that the operational cone was unchanged. The hurricane center supplied the experimental graphics and talked with the research team along the way. The researchers say the work does not criticize the center’s forecasting, which they consider highly accurate, and focuses on how the information is communicated.

What the survey found, and what it left unchanged

As summarized by ScienceDaily, the study found three things. Residents without specialized weather knowledge were better at identifying inland areas under hurricane or tropical storm watches when they viewed the experimental graphic. They showed no improvement in identifying areas under storm warnings. And the graphic did not significantly change how dangerous they thought storms would be or whether they intended to take protective measures. Participants were shown either the conventional cone or the experimental version. Neither the ScienceDaily summary nor the FSU release reports a sample size or statistical results, so the size of these effects is not available from them.

The paper itself, titled “Uncertain about the New Cone? How Nonexperts Perceive NHC’s Experimental Track-Forecast Product,” is listed at DOI 10.1175/WCAS-D-25-0158.1 and carries the page number 843. An internal FSU SEED grant funded the work.

Communication advice from the authors

Ray’s advice is to pair the cone with clear local information about expected impacts and recommended actions: “Don’t rely on the cone alone.” She and the release point readers toward local forecasts for a fuller picture of what a storm could mean for a specific place. Ray said the misconception can be “hard to shake,” which squares with the survey’s result that the new design moved watch recognition but not the underlying read of the cone’s shape. The cone answers where the center might go, not how far hazardous winds, flooding or tornadoes could reach.

The journal is published by the American Meteorological Society, and the paper appears in volume 18, issue 3 of 2026. Merle, who directs FSU’s School of Communication, said “The science is excellent,” and emphasized that communication succeeds only when people can understand information well enough to act on it. That is the gap the study measures. A graphic can be accurate and still be misread, and in this survey the misreading of the cone’s width persisted across versions, with Florida and Georgia respondents carrying the same intuition from the familiar cone into the new one.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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