Dissemination of forecast products through the NHC website: today and moving forward

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) website (www.nhc.noaa.gov or hurricanes.gov) is the primary means of disseminating tropical cyclone forecasts for the National Weather Service (NWS). In FY14, the NHC website had nearly 100 million visits. For major hurricane landfalls. It is not uncommon for the website to receive over 1 billion hits during major US landfall events, such as Isaac (2012, 1.6 billion in 10 days) and Sandy (2012, 1.1 billion in 9 days). Recently, NWS has partnered with Google to develop more in-depth analytics beyond merely the number of page loads or hits, such as the path people took to get to a product, how long they spent viewing it, and even where they clicked on the NHC homepage to get there. This information can be used to make improvements to the existing NHC website and forecast products, helping NHC to remain relevant in a rapidly evolving technological world. As the NWS emphasizes Decision Support Services, this information can be also be used to guide new product and dissemination method development.

This presentation will discuss how the general public accesses and uses the NHC website, what products they are most interested in, and how this information is being used to make improvements to NHC products. The future of NHC product dissemination will also be discussed, including how tropical forecast products will be made publically available through the NOAA Integrated Dissemination Program (IDP) in 2016.