If you haven't seen the graphic yet, take a moment to watch the segment below. It starts normally enough, with a top-side view of the Eastern seaboard, showing the "reasonable worst-case scenario" of water levels. (The data comes from the National Hurricane Center.) But about 45 seconds in, a shift occurs. Meteorologist Erika Navarro stands not in a studio, but on a neighborhood street corner. And then the waters around her start to rise.
On one level, yes, the visualization literally just shows what 3, 6, and 9 feet of water looks like. But it's showing that in a context most people have never experienced. It fills in the gaps of your imagination, and hopefully underscores for anyone in a flood zone all the reasons they should not be.
A year ago, this wouldn't have been possible. In fact, this specific demonstration wouldn't have been possible a month ago. The Weather Channel only finished the new "green-screen immersive studio" at its Atlanta headquarters this week. With peak hurricane season coming, it wanted to be prepared. "It was all hands on deck," says Michael Potts, TWC's vice president of design.
Working with the Future Group, a company that specializes in "interactive mixed reality," TWC began building out the various elements it would need to make extreme—or mundane, if there were ever cause for it—weather events feel like they were happening in-studio. In June, it buzzed anchor Jim Cantore with a tornado. In late July, it blasted lightning.
But as impressive as those previous demonstrations were, they lacked the immersiveness and fidelity that Thursday's Hurricane Florence display provided. That's because of both the wraparound green screen, which helps completely surround Navarro, and the immediacy of the data the graphic is based on.
"The entire goal is to try to paint and recreate a reality that's in the future."
That short window of time belies how much tech underpins the rest of the operation, though. The studio is outfitted with a Mo-Sys camera tracking system, a physical box that attaches to a camera and uses sensors and an IR signal to triangulate the camera's position in a virtual space. TWC also needed specialized software to translate the Unreal Engine graphics into a broadcast-ready format.
Bringing extreme weather to life obviously isn't an entirely altruistic goal; it's compelling television, too. Potts contends, though, that videos like this one also contain a valuable safety message. You know what 9 feet is, and you know what water looks like. But the two rarely go together, outside of swimming pools and disaster movies. Seeing what it looks like on a street corner that resembles your own might be enough to get someone to evacuate if they'd had any hesitation. At the very least, it lets the rest of the world know just how bad it could get.
While only one studio at TWC supports the full suite of technology needed to create an animated storm surge, the company hopes to build out more. You can expect to see more demonstrations like this one, says Potts, as well new animations for wildfires and other extreme weather events.