Improving the understanding of hurricanes: Visualizing storm surge

Improved methods for visualizing hurricanes, specifically their associated storm surge, will increase the understanding of the effects of hurricanes. Enhanced understanding could result in better preparedness, safer evacuations, and less loss of life when a hurricane strike is eminent. Using Hurricane Katrina (2005) and its catastrophic, record-breaking storm surge as an example, we created storm surge visualizations of both measured and modeled data (Fig. 1).