Trump Holds Up Doctored Hurricane Map, Meteorologists Cringe

A hurricane update goes awry when U.S. President Donald Trump refers to a map, from Aug. 29, 2019, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., Sept. 4. See anything funny on the map?

(Image credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty)

As Hurricane Dorian bore down on the Atlantic coast on Wednesday (Sept. 4), meteorologists suddenly found themselves facing an unexpected hurricane hazard: a president with a Sharpie pen.

In a White House briefing, President Donald Trump held up a hurricane advisory map from Thursday (Aug. 29) showing Dorian's five-day "cone of uncertainty" potentially passing over Florida. At the end of the cone was a addendum: a loop drawn with a black Sharpie covering Alabama. The doctored map was in defense of a tweet the president had made on Sunday (Sept. 1) warning that Alabama was in harm's way.

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By Sunday, though, the forecasts had improved, and meteorologists were already predicting that Dorian would veer north, brushing along the Florida coast before heading toward the Carolinas — no chance of it hitting Alabama. The National Hurricane Center had released a map, Hurricane Dorian Advisory #032A, to this effect before the president's tweet. (The map shown in the Sept. 4 Oval Office briefing was Advisory #21.)

Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.