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Tone turns ominous at The Weather Channel

Meteorologist Jim Cantore, the network’s most visible personality, said it was unlike anything he’d ever seen or covered. He had to take a brief break from his live reports from New York’s Battery Park City to move his belongings because his hotel had been evacuated; his publicist’s apartment was also in the evacuation zone.

Bryan Norcross, the network’s senior hurricane specialist, explained in an interview that the network tries to keep its tone serious yet urgent. The network’s computer models have been consistent in their forecasts of the storm and it has been acting as anticipated, perhaps with even more strength.

“Our goal has been to get people to appreciate the magnitude of the storm and try to prove to them that, based on everything we know, that this is going to be a system that is outside of their experience,” Norcross said.

The Weather Channel sent a message via Twitter calling it “an extraordinary storm, an extremely serious threat” and urged followers to re-tweet it. The storm “will occupy a place in the annals of weather history as one of the most extraordinary to have affected the United States,” the network tweeted.

Quickly, the Business Insider tweeted: “WHOA. The Weather Channel meteorologist just completely freaked out.”