Social media Tracking Hurricanes

 This might frustrate some people when I say this but this needs to be said. I've tracked hurricanes for 10+ years and without a doubt the state of hurricane tracking has gotten out of hand with Erin. To keep people from being scared from misinformation/wishcasting we create a state of posting about a potential storm 5+ days before it comes off the coast of Africa all because a couple models showed landfall on the US 300+ hours out. Not only does this just wear people out, it causes a state of anxiety. They hide behind the statements of "informing" and "don't stress out", while also drawing arrows or boxes that have landfalls in the US while cherry-picking a past hurricane that was "supposed to go out to sea" but made a major landfall in the US. 

    I remember when the Euro only went to 240 hours. Days were better then because we didn't have as long range of model to worry about hypecasting when they went haywire. People followed better rules back then like not worrying about a Hurricane that was 15+ days away. Or tracking spaghetti models on a invest that didn't have a closed low, or ensemble members being misused.  

    Now anyone can have access to a weather model, which is a double-edged sword. On one hand you don't have to wait for your favorite meteorologist to post about a system and you could just pull it up yourself. On the other hand, anyone who has no knowledge about weather/weather model can post a misinformed weather post scaring people about something that isn't going to happen. To try to counter this, informed meteorologists post about the said problem to calm people down.

    The issue is now the informed meteorologists have crossed a line of oversaturating social media about a system that "might" make landfall 15-20 days out. This is all because a couple of models 300 hours out were posted. They have posted for the last week or so now about Erin having the potential to make landfall even though they didn't have enough data to match. They care more about being the "first" to mention it than following grounded rules about not believing model tracks when there isn't a closed circulation so the errors will be higher. Also focusing on 10+ days out landfall when most models can't reliability track a hurricane 5+ days out without 150+ miles of error further exasperating the issue.

    In conclusion meteorologists need to stop posting 5+ times a day on Erin. If you want to make a post one or two times a day that seems reasonable, but anymore than that is ridiculous. For one, it does seem to track away from the US coastline. Secondly it is still 10+ days away to make landfall anyways.  We need to have better ground rules before we post so haywire about it; otherwise we are no better than the misinformed posters elsewhere.