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A scary-looking weather forecast showing a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast in the second half of June swirled around social media this week—but don’t panic.
It’s the season’s first “ghost hurricane.”
Similar hype plays out every hurricane season, especially at the beginning: A cherry-picked, worst-case-scenario model run goes viral, but more often than not, will never come to fruition.
Unofficially dubbed “ghost storms” or “ghost hurricanes,” these tropical systems regularly appear in weather models — computer simulations that help meteorologists forecast future conditions — but never seem to manifest in real life.
The model responsible this week was the