VISUALIZING UNCERTAINTY IN PREDICTED HURRICANE TRACKS
Jonathan Peter Cox, Donald H. House, Michael K. Lindell · International Journal for Uncertainty Quantification · 2012
The error cone is a display produced by the National Hurricane Center in order to present its predictions of the path of a hurricane.While the error cone is one of the primary tools used by officials, and the general public, to make emergency response decisions, the uncertainty underlying this display can be easily misunderstood.This paper explores the design of an alternate display that provides a continually updated set of possible hurricane tracks, whose ensemble distribution closely matches the underlying statistics of a hurricane prediction.We explain the underlying algorithm and data structures, and demonstrate how our displays compare with the error cone.Finally, we review the design and results of a user study that we conducted as a preliminary test of the efficacy of our approach in communicating prediction uncertainty.