Memories like that can make people disregard warnings that they ought to heed. In 2011, Hurricane Irene’s forecasts prompted evacuations in New York, but the storm didn’t end up causing a disaster there. When Hurricane Sandy came the next year, the experiences of Irene prompted some people directly in harm’s way to stay put — to their great regret when the 2012 storm did live up to its scary billing.

Can’t meteorologists be more precise?

Not really. The scientific information forecasters are charged with communicating is uncertain not because they are doing anything wrong. The information is inherently uncertain, because of chaos, also known as the butterfly effect. Undetectable small errors in our knowledge of today’s weather quickly grow, becoming big errors in forecasts of weather a few days hence. So while we know quite a bit about Dorian’s future, that knowledge can be properly expressed only in the language of probabilities.

And because not taking a dangerous storm seriously enough can have a much bigger down side (as in people dying) than taking a not-so-dangerous storm more seriously than turns out to be necessary (people evacuate who didn’t need to), forecasters have to talk about the worst-case scenarios more than they talk about the best-case ones.

And that guarantees that there will be false alarms sometimes.

The uncertainties will not go away until the future becomes the past, but they do get smaller as that storm we’re all watching nears. So “monitor the situation” is still the right advice now, frustrating as it may be.