About Hurricane Spaghetti Models
What are spaghetti models? You may have also heard them called spaghetti
plots. They're derived from numerical weather models that look at tropical
disturbances and storms and indicate on a map, where the different models
expect that a storm may travel. They also contain data of the predicted
strength of a given disturbance / storm.
Sometimes, you might have some crazy spaghetti with the "strands" of pasta
going every which way. Sometimes all of the models tend to agree about the
general path and strength and are quite reliable. Spaghetti models can
give you an instant obvious glance in to how "stable" the forecast for a
given storm is.
Here at Hurricane Spaghetti Models, we aim to give you that extra insight
that an official hurricane path forecast can't give you: a look into the
level of uncertainty with a given storm.
With our maps and graphs, you can check the official trajectory against
what these crazy forecast models are saying. Here's this theoretical storm
in the Gulf of Mexico. Which way will it go? Or as a real example,
Hurricane Debbie in the Gulf of Mexico. This storm had spaghetti models
going every which way. Would she land in Texas? Or in Florida? Or maybe
somewhere in the middle? There sure wasn't much agreement between the
different models. Hurricane Debbie's official forecast path sure wouldn't
show you the amount of insanity at hand.
These models are mostly meant for entertainment purposes as some of them
will be beyond crazy in what they predict, and without a meteorological
background, you wouldn't necessarily know why this model was all sorts of
insanity.
And then you have the XTRP model which is short for the extrapolated path
and basically will just show you where the hurricane would go, if only
things never changed and it continued on its merry way taking the same
path that it's been taking for the past hours.
It's early days here and we're just getting started so expect more
exciting things to come. Want a timelapse of different parallel universes
in which a storm goes every which way? Or want to see where the previous
spaghetti models have put a storm going? Well, we don't have those yet,
but we will soon.
This site is built using the Astro site builder which lets us focus on the
site content without having to think of how many hours the site might take
to build (because it builds super quick!). We also are using
JavaScript/Typescript, Leaflet for the maps (or maybe Maplibre if we're
feeling lucky). And D3.js for the strength predictability graphs. Here at
Hurricane Spaghetti Models, we don't like to throw any one tool at a
problem. We prefer to throw the whole kitchen sink at it (trust me, sinks
are heavy)!
The hurricane season for 2021 will be over soon as this is being written,
so things might be quiet for awhile, but we'll certainly be ready when the
next season comes along.
And have you seen the name list? No more do we have to figure out the
difference between different Greek letters that bare absolutely no
alphabetical relation the English language order. Not to mention similar
names back to back like Zeta and Eta (or was it Eta and Zeta, we'll
never know). No, from here on out there's going to be an auxiliary list for
when the names overflow and we've run out of the alphabet again.
So if you're new here, welcome. We hope you find this site useful (though
maybe not this wall of text!).
