Hurricane forecasting has got noticeably better over the last 15 years or so from what I’ve seen, but it’s obviously still not quite there yet. What I don’t want to see is them going back to the sky is falling method where they issue an evacuation warning every time a minor storm brews. That was the cause of much needless loss of life in Katrina. I’m in Mississippi and at the time the weather forecasters liked to overplay the risk for every storm, whether that was for advertising revenue or to cover their rear I don’t know, but they always took a chicken little approach and the result was hurricane warning burnout. We would get so many hurricane warnings that people stopped taking them seriously, I think there had been about ten of them over the two years prior to Katrina. When the big one finally arrived a lot of people didn’t listen because we’d had so many grossly exaggerated ones before. People just ignored them until it was too late.
Forecasters run the risk of being ignored if they sensationalize every storm. There’s a middle ground where they need to keep the public informed while not disrupting people’s lives needlessly.
Also, authorities have got to be careful to not become the "Boy who Cried Wolf".
You WANT people to evacuate when it is coming, and not say, "Remember when we evacuate during Dorian, and then it went North, and we spent thousands in gas and lodging, only to get home in a constant rush hour and find our house was robbed? Never leaving again!!!"
Like when TWC names every winter storm.
I thought Katrina hit the Louisiana coast as a Cat 3 and lost strength as it moved up to Mississippi. What caught New Orleans residents off-guard was the tremendous flooding from all that rain finally sluicing down the Mississippi River three days later. That overwhelmed the mismanaged and dilapidated system of levees around the city. Residents thought the danger had passed with the hurricane but didn’t reckon on the floods.