Hammy wrote:captainbarbossa19 wrote:BobHarlem wrote:
Potential Tropical Cyclone advisories, they introduced this a few years back to handle the case of rapidly developing systems near the coast. It's only used when a system is not quite a depression, but expected to be a storm before the watch/warning window is up. They only use it if they need to put up Tropical Storm Watches/Warnings before a storm has technically formed. TV Weather people tend to hate it because it confuses folks. Not to be confused with Post Tropical Cyclone, which also shares the acronym.
I still don't understand why the hurricane center decided to start using this terminology. I know that it's purpose is to help raise awareness of a storm's presence, but I think for many people, it is quite confusing.
I believe it was a response to Hurricane Sandy becoming extratropical before moving inland as well as several instances of storms developing rapidly before moving inland even though there was a trackable precursor disturbance.
Nope - that was a change made in 2013 to broaden the definition of TS and Hurricane watches and warnings: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/news/20130404_ ... hanges.pdf
Since there's a lot of questions on PTC, this is a really good read explaining the entire background and why they chose what the did: https://noaanhc.wordpress.com/2017/06/2 ... -warnings/