UPDATE 10/30/25: That MSN article disappeared, so here is a report on hurricane cone straight from The Weather Channel: https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/2025-10-22-weather-words-cone-of-uncertainty Thanks to Dr. Emily Cohen-Shikora for the head's up about the dead link!
The New York Times created a beautiful, interactive website (it looked exceptionally sharp on my phone). The website attempts to explain what hurricane prediction maps tell us, as well as how people interpret them. The website is at NYT, so you likely hit a paywall if you have already viewed three stories on the NYT website in the last month. As such, I've included screenshots here.
Here is a map with the projected hurricane path. People think that the white line indicates where the hurricane will go, and the red indicates bad weather. They also think that the broader path further inland means that the storm will increase in size.
And this misinterpretation of the data changes human behavior, potentially making people feel safe than they really are.
In actuality, that graphic is trying to encompass all likely projected paths (illustrated below with the red dotted lines)
The circles grow larger over time because uncertainty grows over time, as temporal distance increases.
At the end of the day, the overall cone will contain the hurricane 60-70 percent of the time. This is similar to how we are confident that our confidence interval will contain true mu 95 or 90% of the time.
