Galveston's Hurricane Hal vows to stamp out 'severe storm anxiety'

Whenever a storm like Tropical Storm Bertha appears, Galveston meteorologist Dr. Hal Needham knows he must do two things.

One is relaying National Hurricane Center updates to the 34,000 followers who know him on Facebook as Hurricane Hal (plus nearly 1,600 more on Instagram). The second is, hopefully, talking them down from an acute psychological condition he has come to refer to as "severe storm anxiety."

It's hardly outrageous to suggest that most people in the Houston area know exactly what Needham means. Severe weather episodes are simply how residents here measure the passage of time, whether epochal events-the Astros' first World Series championship coming weeks after Hurricane Harvey; Hurricane Ike effectively splitting Galveston's modern calendar into 'before' and 'after' eras-or more personal milestones.

"If you think about it, some of the main ways our history is defined around here is through storms," Needham said. "Not just damage and death, but people [will] say, 'Oh yeah, my cousin lived here until Ike' or 'When did you move here?' 'Oh, I came after Harvey to help with the flood cleanup and I never left.'"

For Needham, founder of the Galveston Hurricane Tour (check his social media for a schedule), Bertha is shaping up as a textbook case. Due to dry air masses nearby and wind shear-competing air currents he likens to spraying several inches of whipped cream onto a stack of waffles and then putting a box fan next to it-the storm's development has so far been erratic and underwhelming.

If present conditions hold, Bertha will be lucky to limp ashore somewhere around New Orleans, sparing the Houston area all but the most peripheral effects. (Maybe.) And yet one might never know that based on the online reactions Needham has encountered since the storm began forming late last weekend.

"The idea of a storm even being out there, just the concept of it, creates [a] severe amount of anxiety," he told Chron Tuesday morning. "I noticed this and [thought], 'Wow, this is interesting. The storm isn't even coming this way, and people are on edge. It seems like it's a trauma response.'"

Needham was quick to point out that Gulf Coast residents have every right to be wary of new storms. Many have lost loved ones to past hurricanes, or one might have claimed their house. After nearly being killed when a drunk driver rear-ended him almost 30 years ago, his pulse will race any time traffic backs up on Interstate 45, so he understands the source of their fears. That also gives him a light touch in helping to dispel them.

"We'll be talking about a storm going to the Florida Panhandle and there'll be some subset of the population that starts to really get a little panicky about it, so I try to be really sensitive about that," Needham said. "I feel like some of the forecast products out there... they really, unfortunately, increase these fears people [have], maybe unnecessarily."

As if on cue, "Hurricane Hal is a lone voice of reason when it comes to weathermen trying to drive the hype and increase the viewership," one Facebook user wrote Tuesday. "After following him and seeing his coverage, I notice the weather TV station hype much more now."

So as Needham tracked Bertha this week, he also found himself defending his decision to focus on other NHC data besides the so-called 'cone of uncertainty,' the map that, more or less, represents scientists' best guess of the path the storm will follow as it develops. The cone's close companion is the 'spaghetti model,' which shows a range of paths the storm could take as different variables change.

One problem with the cone, Needham explained, is that its fundamentally hypothetical nature often gets lost in translation: because it shows where a storm could go (and despite the name), many people assume that's where it will go. If Southeast Texas shows up on the map, as it did this weekend, better stock up on batteries and bottled water.

"If there's a legit storm threat on the horizon, I'll be the first to post it," Needham wrote Monday afternoon. "But much of the time people are reacting to storms that are never coming."

The other problem is that, for whatever reason, the cone has become the dominant image across both social and professional media for any developing tropical cyclone. With Bertha, "if you go to Twitter and put in 'Tropical Storm Bertha,' I think 80 percent of the graphics you're gonna see [are] the cone map," Needham said. "It's everywhere."

Needham was careful to explain that he is in no way trying to undermine the NHC-whose meteorologists are "doing an amazing job," he said-just cautioning the public that treating the cone map as gospel can be misleading. Instead, his posts this week have focused on other NHC maps that show wind speed probabilities or the peak storm surge.

"The things I'm leading with are very different because I spend a lot of time with people in the community and I get this feel they just want to know where the wind and water [are] going," he said. "They don't care about the center of circulation, really."

Needham said he thinks the cone of uncertainty has come to dominate contemporary storm coverage because "for centuries, storms blindsided us" and scientists have overcompensated somewhat by concentrating on perfecting their weather models at the expense of communicating clearly with the public. Too often, this can have real consequences for coastal economies.

For example, a friend of Needham's stepson works for a fishing-charter outfit that has already canceled this week's trips because of Bertha. It's impossible to say how many trips to the coast the cone of uncertainty might have claimed this time, but it's likely not zero, and hurricane season still has several weeks to go.

"What I'm really trying to do is zero in on how to improve that communication, how to improve that understanding," Needham said. "You don't want people to ever get blindsided by a storm they weren't prepared for, but you also don't want people full of [unnecessary] anxiety or irrational fears that aren't important either. So you're trying to find that balance, really."

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