How to Publish a Hurricane Track Forecast (Before Season Starts)

Hurricane season starts June 1. If you're a tropical enthusiast who's been running your own track analyses for years and posting them as screenshots on X, 2026 is the year to do it right.

This is a step-by-step guide to publishing a structured hurricane track forecast — with a map, your specific call for landfall timing and impact zones, and a permanent URL that lets you build an actual track record across the season.

Why screenshots aren't good enough

The standard indie hurricane forecaster workflow in 2025 looks like this: open a track plotting tool (Tropical Tidbits' cone tool, or just screenshotting NHC's graphic with annotations), draw your track, post as an image to social media, and hope the algorithm serves it before the storm makes landfall.

It works, kind of. But it has three problems:

Your call isn't structured. A screenshot doesn't record your precise predicted impact zones, your accumulation ranges, or your confidence windows. It's an image. Nobody can verify it afterward without digging through your timeline.

Your track record doesn't exist. If you were right about Helene's track when the 48-hour models were all over the place, that's a legitimate forecasting credential. But if it lives in a screenshot buried in your tweet history, it might as well not exist.

Your audience isn't building. A great call during a major storm generates engagement in the moment. If there's no place for those followers to subscribe, you lose most of that audience the second the storm is off the news cycle.

What a structured hurricane forecast looks like

A proper hurricane forecast on ForecasterHQ works like this:

Draw your impact zones — not just a track, but polygon regions by area (Gulf Coast, Florida Peninsula, Southeast Atlantic Seaboard, etc.) with your specific wind/rain/surge intensity call for each
Assign your accumulation/impact ranges — wind speed ranges, rainfall totals, surge heights — whatever the relevant parameters are for the storm type
Set your event window — start and end time for when you expect the storm's primary impacts
Publish — your forecast gets a permanent URL and a map card that embeds anywhere

The result looks like how the NHC actually communicates risk — zones, parameters, timing — except it's your call, with your name on it, timestamped before the event.

Step-by-step: publishing your first tropical forecast

Step 1: Create your ForecasterHQ account

Go to forecasterhq.com/claim. It's free. Setup takes about two minutes.

Step 2: Start a new storm forecast

On your dashboard, select New Forecast → Storm Forecast. Storm forecast is the right type for a hurricane — it supports the "draw regions, assign impact ranges, set event timing" structure that fits tropical forecasting. You can see a live example storm forecast to get a sense of what the finished product looks like before you start.

Step 3: Draw your impact zones

The map builder uses polygon drawing tools similar to Google My Maps, but purpose-built for forecasting. For a hurricane:

Primary landfall zone — the area you expect direct impacts from the core (eyewall/inner rainbands). Draw this tight.
Outer impact zone — broader area receiving significant but lesser impacts from outer bands.
Surge-at-risk zone — if you have a coastal storm, draw a separate region for surge risk with your storm surge range.
Inland flooding zone — rivers and inland areas at risk from rainfall, particularly for slow-moving storms.

You're not limited to a single track line. The cone concept translates directly to polygons — draw where you think the impacts fall, not just the center track.

Step 4: Set your ranges

For each region, assign your predicted values:

Wind speed range (sustained max, in mph or kt)
Rainfall accumulation range (inches)
Storm surge range (if applicable, in feet above normal tide)

These become the structured prediction that gets matched against observations after the event.

Step 5: Set the event window

Set your forecast start and end time — typically when you're publishing the forecast to when you expect the storm to move offshore or weaken below tropical storm strength.

Step 6: Write your narrative and publish

Add a brief text forecast explaining your reasoning — model guidance you're weighting, key uncertainties, what you're watching for. This is your analysis layer, separate from the structured regions.

Hit Publish. Your forecast is live at a permanent URL with a shareable map card.

Using your forecast during the storm

As the storm approaches and your forecast goes through its window, you'll see your published forecast alongside real-time information. If you want to update your call as new data comes in, you can edit your forecast before the event window closes.

After the storm passes, ForecasterHQ pulls NWS observation station data and IEM Local Storm Reports and matches them against your drawn regions. You'll see:

Which stations fell within your predicted ranges
Which fell outside
A strip-plot visualization showing the distribution of observations vs. your call

That's your verification record for the storm — public, permanent, attached to your forecaster profile.

The compound value: season-long track record

One storm forecast is useful. A season-long series of tropical forecasts, verified against observations, builds something more valuable: a track record that earns trust before the next storm forms.

The forecasters who build real audiences during hurricane season aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest reach before June 1. They're the ones who've been consistently posting structured calls and coming back after each event with honest analysis.

ForecasterHQ is built for that arc — not just the individual forecast, but the season-long record that makes future forecasts worth following. Browse the Discover page to see what published tropical forecasters look like on the platform.

Ready to publish your first tropical forecast? Hurricane season is coming. Sign up to publish your own tropical forecast before season starts — free on ForecasterHQ.

Before June 1: get your profile set up now

The best time to publish your first tropical forecast is during pre-season activity — atmospheric waves, early development, model runs that don't go anywhere. Use those lower-stakes events to get comfortable with the workflow before you're racing to publish during a major storm chase.

Your profile also compounds during the off-season. Followers you build from winter and spring forecasts will be there when the tropics get active.

If you want to go further with the visual side of your forecasts, read our guide on building a weather forecast map — it covers how to get more out of the map builder for any forecast type, not just tropical.

For the model analysis side of your workflow, our comparison of weather model viewers for indie forecasters covers Pivotal Weather, WX Charts, Tropical Tidbits, and WeatherBELL — including which is worth paying for as tropical activity picks up.

Claim your ForecasterHQ page → — free to start, takes less than two minutes to set up.