The National Hurricane Center is changing some of its forecast products before the 2026 hurricane season, giving storm maps a new look and adding more information about threats far beyond the coast. The biggest shift is the forecast cone, which will become more elliptical than circular, and the tropical outlook map will mark waves with a 0% chance of development with a grey X.
Robbie Berg said the center is moving to the 90th percentile, meaning the storm center should stay inside the cone nine times out of 10. “We're moving to what's called the 90th percentile, meaning the center should only move outside that cone one tenth of the time, or 10% of the time. So there's less of a chance that the center will move outside of that new experimental cone,” Berg said.
The change matters because the cone has long been one of the public’s main tools for judging where a storm might go, and the updated version is meant to show a smaller chance of the center ending up outside it. The hurricane center also said the cone image will now include inland watches and warnings, extending those alerts farther inland than before. Previously, the tropical watches and warnings were only for areas along the coast.
The update is not about a single storm. It is about how the agency wants to communicate risk before a storm arrives, and it is doing that by pushing more detail into the products people already check. The tropical weather outlook will now use a grey X for any system with a near-zero chance of development instead of yellow, making the lowest-risk systems easier to spot at a glance.
There is still a larger change ahead. The National Hurricane Center eventually wants a more dynamic cone that can shift more cleanly as a storm approaches, which suggests this new version is a step toward a forecast graphic that moves with the weather instead of sitting still on the page. For Hawaii, the update is broader still: storm surge watches, warnings, flooding and surge forecasts are now available for the islands, adding more local detail to a region that has not always been covered in the same way.
The practical answer for readers is simple: before the 2026 hurricane season begins, the National Hurricane Center is widening the reach of its warning tools while narrowing what the cone is meant to say about uncertainty. That makes the map less coastal, more inland and harder to misread.