Trump Corrects National Hurricane Forecast With Black Marker, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Storm's Path Was Being Determined By Meteorologists Instead Of The President

WASHINGTON. Moving decisively to reconcile the National Weather Service's projected path for Hurricane Dorian with a forecast he had already issued personally on Twitter, President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday presented reporters with an official government hurricane map that had been extended into Alabama using a black felt-tip marker.

The map, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projection dated August 29, depicted the storm's "cone of uncertainty" tracking up the Atlantic coast. A roughly semicircular loop drawn in marker enlarged that cone to take in the southeastern corner of Alabama, a state the official forecast did not place in the storm's path and that the President had identified as endangered three days earlier.

"Alabama will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated," the President had written on September 1, prompting the National Weather Service office in Birmingham to advise the public, within roughly twenty minutes, that Alabama would see no impacts from the hurricane. Faced with a federal agency contradicting him in writing, the President directed the resources of the executive branch toward establishing that the agency had erred. Asked Wednesday who had drawn the loop on the map, he said, "I don't know. I don't know."

Two days later, NOAA issued an unsigned statement disavowing its own Birmingham forecasters and backing the President's account, a sequence the administration characterized as the weather service correcting itself. "The forecast was always evolving," said one source within the administration, who noted that the President's contribution had simply evolved it faster, and with office supplies.

The episode resolved a persistent structural flaw in American meteorology, under which the trajectory of a hurricane had been determined by satellite data, computer modeling, and the judgment of career forecasters, none of whom had been elected to anything. Commentators noted that altering a federal weather forecast and presenting it as official may run afoul of federal law, an observation the administration did not address.

At press time, the President was reviewing a map of the federal budget deficit and reaching for a marker.