The National Hurricane Center is no longer producing a forecast track for Florence.
Around a million people on the US Eastern Seaboard face evacuation as Hurricane Florence bears down on North Carolina. The storm is one of the most powerful to threaten the Atlantic Coast in decades.
The National Hurricane Center issues forecasts every 3 hours, and this map will update automatically. The line shows the most likely predicted path, the cone shows the uncertainty around that forecast, and the color is an estimate of the likelihood of that area experiencing hurricane-force winds — greater than 74 mph — over the next five days.
The precise track of a storm is difficult to forecast: About a third of the time, the center of a storm’s path may veer outside of the predicted cone of uncertainty. Flooding from storm surges and severe wind and rain can also be dangerous well away from the center of a storm. So even if your home is not currently in the cone, don’t assume that you are safe.
“This is a huge system, it’s a big engine,” Steven Pfaff, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, told BuzzFeed News. “And its impacts are going to be so far outside of the center tracks — there’s a potential for millions of people to be impacted by this.”
See here for the latest watches and warnings about the storm and here for other information from the National Hurricane Center.
With reporting from Zahra Hirji.
UPDATE
Updated to reflect the fact that the National Hurricane Center is no longer producing a forecast track for Florence.