"The NHC's system for disseminating the forecast is archaic and relies on the media to sort it out and get it right, but the content was all there.

In the Hurricane Center advisory, the critical storm surge forecast was buried toward the bottom of the text. In newspaper terms, that's like putting the main headline in the sports section. The discussion of the scope of the impact of the storm related to its large size was relegated to the somewhat technical "Discussion". And more key pieces of information are scattered hither and yon.

It's up to the media to assemble a precise, informed, and consistent message from the torrent of good information that comes out of the National Hurricane Center. It's hard for us at The Weather Channel to digest it all at advisory time, and we've got more meteorologists that you can shake a stick at. Four of us on the Tropical Team were working on it Tuesday evening at landfall, and it was still hard. And nobody else has close to our resources.

And then there's the local National Weather Service offices. They, too, make excellent forecasts, but their communications systems seem doubly determined to make it difficult to find out what they are forecasting. The bottom line, if it takes more than one click to find critical information for Tampa or Mobile or Slidell or anywhere else, the system is broken."