When a hurricane threatens, mass media are one of the main conduits for getting information to those at risk. Modern U.S. hurricane forecasts are the product of research, operational, and communications work carried out by many people. Satellite images and forecast graphics have become a vital tool in conveying hurricane risk. Yet the individual forecaster/spokesperson also continues to play a highly visible role--perhaps more so than for any other weather threat.

At the start of the 20th century, before electronic mass media were part of everyday life, warning dissemination was relatively haphazard. At the time of the 1900 Galveston hurricane, warnings were coordinated from the U.S. Weather Bureau's office in Washington, D.C. Isaac Cline, of the Bureau's Galveston office, issued a unauthorized warning shortly before the city was struck by what became the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

From 1935 to 1955, the U.S. Weather Bureau's hurricane functions were decentralized. During this period, Grady Norton, the Bureau's chief Florida-based forecaster, became a fixture on area radio broadcasts, praised for his ability to communicate the forecast in simple terms and his skill at enlivening the science of hurricane behavior by ascribing human qualities to each system.

A string of intense hurricanes struck the U.S. coast in the 1950s, a period that also brought the recentralization of U.S. forecasts through the National Hurricane Center (NHC), the advent of the current watch-warning system, and the meteoric growth of television. Despite these advances, problems remained, as with the deadly Hurricane Audrey (1957), where warnings were inadequately disseminated to vulnerable residents of southwest Louisiana.

By the 1980s, local TV and radio stations and national networks routinely broadcast hurricane information. The arrival of The Weather Channel (TWC) in 1982 made hurricane expert John Hope a popular and trusted presence for millions of viewers. Similarly, the introduction of satellite-linked interviews allowed NHC director Neil Frank to address millions of local viewers in dozens of separate segments for each hurricane, making him the most-recognized NOAA employee in the nation. The centralized nature of hurricane warnings, with the NHC the only source of official advisories, may have facilitated the rise of spokespeople such as Frank and Hope, who delivered consistent messages that emphasized risks yet remained avuncular and reassuring in tone.

Innovations in the graphical presentation of hurricane information include satellite loops (introduced in the 1960s and refined thereafter) and the NHC's “cone of uncertainty” graphic for storm motion (introduced in 2002). These tools vividly showed the risk to the central Gulf Coast as Hurricane Katrina approached in 2005. Moreover, TWC's Steve Lyons and NHC's Max Mayfield stressed the dire nature of the threat in widely viewed television segments. Yet Katrina resulted in more than 1,800 deaths, the largest such toll in more than 75 years. The case of Katrina emphasizes how the presence of accurate and widely disseminated warnings is a necessary but insufficient factor in reducing hurricane death tolls.