Hurricane season hindsight 2020: Applying the IDEA model toward local tropical cyclone forecasts

Hurricane Laura began as a disorganized tropical depression in August 2020. Early forecast guidance showed that the tropical cyclone could either completely dissipate or strengthen to a major hurricane as it approached the United States Gulf Coast. While this uncertainty was known by meteorologists, it was not necessarily communicated to the public in a direct manner. As it turned out, the worst-case scenario was the correct one. The tropical depression rapidly intensified and made landfall near Cameron, Louisiana, with sustained winds of 150 mph, making Laura a Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale. Laura’s rapid intensification caught some people off guard. Ideally, weather forecasts would have begun warning Louisiana residents to prepare for the possibility of a devastating hurricane in the early stages of tropical cyclone development. No one is suggesting that meteorologists did anything wrong. However, with the benefit of hindsight and decades of scholarly research in risk communication, we can speculate how an ideal forecast would have been written. This paper demonstrates that there are some simple considerations that could be made that might better alert the public to future hurricane worst-case scenarios, even in uncertain situations.