Hurricane Tracking

With the peak of hurricane season approaching, I know that many people are concerned with how hurricanes may affect WDW and/or cruise vacations. As someone who lives in the FL panhandle (and has for the past 20 years), tracking hurricanes is pretty important to me.

Living where I do, any time there is even a hint of a brewing storm, it becomes major local news; in other parts of the country it may just be a passing comment on a national news/weather program. For those of you who want to track incoming storms, here is a link to the definitive source:

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

This site is worth bookmarking for future reference; it’s my primary source of reliable hurricane information.

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I live far away, but also track them.

Thank you!

Thanks. We were there in October 2016 and got hit with the hurricane. We went in October of last year as the hurricane came up and nearly missed and hit the panhandle. This year we will be there in August with fingers crossed and daily hurricane checks.

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Thanks for the link. I live in Hawaii and the two current storms are headed our way and are constantly on the news for us too.

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Thanks for the link. I go down every September, so I track the storms. Usually I drive, but this trip I decided to fly and get travel insurance.

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Great info - thanks for sharing!

How close to the event do hurricane predictions become more accurate? Heading down in 10 days.

Most forecasts for weather are accurate the most 3 days out… but these still can change drastically the day of.

They update the hurricane forecast several times a day if there’s something notable they are tracking. So you’ll know pretty quickly if that 0% for the two disturbances they are tracking now increases in likelihood of them turning into a tropical storm or hurricane. Also, if it does turn into a hurricane - if you click on the storm it’ll show the most likely path of the storm over time - you can test this now with Flossie (new favorite hurricane name) on the Eastern Pacific tab. If you click on the disturbances (yellow X’s) it’ll show you a radar image.

This is also my go-to source for information on hurricanes.

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good point … computer models run several times through out the day, but again they are models based on current information and so that’s why you can see such a variance in forecast for storm/hurricane systems through out a day, and leading up to.

I tend to not pay attention until three days out of an event lol, just because of the variance.

The essence of a hurricane is its unpredictability in the last few days before landfall. For example…3 days out Katrina was supposed to make landfall on the far eastern end of the panhandle; possibly even hugging the west coast of the peninsula. By the next day it was heading straight towards Pensacola (far west end of the panhandle). the next day it made landfall, as we all know, in NOLA. Generally speaking you know if it’s coming into the Gulf or not 4-5 days out, but after that… Another one (David, maybe), at 9:00 PM, was supposed to hit Pensacola around 2:00 AM. When I woke up at 7:00 AM, with not much storm, I checked the weather, and literally as the outer arms were making landfall it took a hard right and hit Ft. Walton Beach, about 60 miles to our East instead.

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Fascinating. I have been living in the upper Midwest and so paid a lot more attention to snow forecasts than anything else!

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