The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization: Do people understand hurricane forecast maps?
Do people understand hurricane forecast maps?
It seems that we'll see hurricane Matthew landing in the U.S. pretty soon. Mashable has just published an article about how to read a hurricane forecast map. It links to this 2007 NOAA study, which explains how readers misinterpret it. One of the authors, Kenny Broad, is a colleague of mine at the University of Miami.
Both Mashable's article and the study mention another map displaying the probability of experiencing hurricane force surface winds (below). Has anybody tested these maps —and others— in controlled experiments recently? It'd be interesting to see the results. If you know of studies about this, please post them in the comments section. If, as I suggest in The Truthful Art, one of the goals when designing a visualization is to reduce misunderstanding and ambiguity, cases like this are of critical relevance.