I understand completely. It's just that we really don't know where it is going right now, and while the projected path is the NHC's best guess as of right now, any deviation now or down the road is going to result in a deviation in the landfall point. We'll have a better idea of where it is headed 3 days before landfall -- before hurricane advisories go up -- and that is when actions should be taken to start to get out, think about evacuating, and so on. Now is the time, though, to review those plans -- as it is for any hurricane season and with any storm -- and to be thinking about getting some supplies you may have forgotten earlier in the year to top off the hurricane supply collection...before the rush comes.

With weather forecasts and, for many years, just a projected path, we've grown used to the weather as a deterministic projection. We much prefer hearing that the high will be in the low 90s instead of hearing that it has a 50% chance of being in the low 90s, a 30% chance of being in the mid-upper 90s, and a 20% chance of being in the upper 80s. Slowly the change is being made to more of the latter, and that's inherently what hurricane track forecasting is (and should be): probabilities of where the storm is going to go (and the related probabilities of the storm reaching a particular intensity). It tells you more than an actual point or number, though doesn't give the comfort of having an actual number. The media and many others, though, need actual numbers, so they'll never go away...it's just a matter of effectively blending the two and knowing what to do with them, whether you are in the field or, like many here, just interested in hurricanes.

These things are amazing to watch, even awe-striking sometimes. Unfortunately, it is in that itself where the reasoning why we can't pin everything down lies; we just can't predict nature as well as we might want to be able to do.