We wanted to create a tool that might enable ordinary people to better grasp what might unfold, to do that we are creating a way to tap into an aspect of the visual system. Our visual world requires us to perceive and use uncertainty, and so the visual system is inherently equipped to interpret those types of information. Leveraging these capabilities with the right visualization might help people understand the forecast and make better decisions.

Jessica Kitt

Participants in our study see a series of hurricane forecasts, and for each forecast they are shown the position of a town in different places relative to the path of the storm, the town might be located directly in the central( most likely) path of the storm or off to the side.

The zoomies offer substantial flexibility with respect to their design, for example, we can use color, size, and flickering to indicate various risks such as extreme wind speeds, rainfall, or storm surge, and those can be perceived within the ensemble.

We also found that you can overlay the zoomies on top of the cone, and people understand the forecast better, in fact, if they have practice with this, they do a better job of interpreting the NHC cone after this experience than if they did not see the zoomies paired with the cone. So a simple switch for meteorologists might be to show zoomies with the cone.