Hurricane Milton: Spaghetti models track the storm’s path

Hurricane Milton strengthened into a Category 3 hurricane this morning as it barrels toward a Florida landfall later this week.

Spaghetti models and the National Hurricane Center‘s prediction cone paint a stark picture of a major hurricane landfall as soon as Wednesday.

Now is the time when we all love to stare at cones and “spaghetti models” showing potential paths as the storm makes its approach, but right from the jump: Please be careful about how you consume this notoriously misunderstood information.

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Hurricane Milton update: See NOAA’s storm path prediction

According to NOAA, as of 7 a.m. ET Monday, Hurricane Milton, is now a major hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 120 mph. It is expected to continue strengthening as it heads toward the Florida peninsula on Wednesday.

In graphic form, that looks like this:

Hurricane Milton is expected to hit Florida later this week.
Credit: NOAA

As a reminder, NOAA’s cone graphic is a fairly reliable prediction of the range of paths the center of the storm may take. The cone is not — as it may appear at first glance — a prediction of an ever-widening storm exploding into the inland United States. Severe wind and storm surge can, and probably will, occur outside the cone, and some areas inside the cone will emerge from the storm totally unscathed.

Hurricane Milton spaghetti models reveal likely track

Spaghetti models, like the NOAA cone model, visualize mathematical possibilities.

Unlike the cone, they present the actual paths predicted by a collection of computer models, all spilling out like spaghetti from Strega Nona’s magical pasta pot. And like the cone, the spaghetti model can be deceptive. All the paths in the spaghetti model are both speculative and contradictions of one another. The actual storm will only follow one path, and it’s almost certain that none of the predicted paths in this splatter of noodles will be perfectly predictive.

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The above model, posted online on the personal X account of Clark Evans, who works as a research physical scientist at NOAA, shows a fairly tight collection of paths. The storm appears to be headed toward Central Florida. How far north or south the storm will hit remains unclear, but Florida is within every predicted track. Tampa could face a direct hit.

Outlier events most often do not come true. But events also don’t conform to averages of predictions. Though top weather models can be astonishingly accurate, the weather simply occurs, and its precise schema is, and will always be, totally alien thanks to the incalculable number of tiny natural and man-made factors that contribute to outcomes.