Hurricane Lala came about 20 miles from making landfall on Hawaii’s Big Island this past weekend. On radar, you could see the eyewall scrape by the island’s southern tip. 

And yet, officially, Lala never made landfall. Here’s what this terminology actually means.

Landfall depends on the storm's center

The National Hurricane Center defines landfall as the intersection of the center of a tropical cyclone with a coastline. 

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Not when the rain bands or strongest winds or storm surge reaches land, but when the center of the circulation does. 

This is why storms that clearly impact a coastline sometimes never get credited with a landfall. If the center stays just offshore, while the destructive side of the storm sweeps the shore, there's still no landfall in the record books. 

This is exactly what happened with Lala. The storm brushed the Big Island, but never made landfall. If it had made landfall, it would have been the Big Island's first hurricane landfall in modern records. 

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But the impacts were still felt. 

The impacts are still the same

Landfall is just terminology; nothing about a storm changes when its center crosses the coast. 

There will still be threats of hurricane-force winds, storm surge and freshwater flooding, sometimes even for days after the storm makes landfall. 

At the moment of landfall, there is still at least half of the storm out over water, likely still making its way inland. The damage doesn’t just stop at the coastline. 

Hurricanes and tropical storms are also enormous. Rainfall, wind and storm surge regularly extend hundreds of miles beyond the center. 

A storm whose center never touches near you can still bring dangerous impacts to you.

So when you're tracking a storm, the point of landfall (or lack of a landfall) won’t tell the whole story. What matters is where you sit relative to the whole system: which side of the track you're on, how far the wind field reaches, whether you're in a surge zone, and how much rain is headed for your watershed. 

Other terminology

Since landfall is such a narrow definition, the NHC uses several other terms to describe what a storm actually does to a place.

Direct hit: A close approach by a tropical cyclone. Technically, if you're on the left side of the storm's track, looking in the direction it's moving, it's a direct hit when the center passes within one radius of maximum wind. If you're on the right side, where storms are typically more dangerous, the threshold doubles. 

Strike: A location is struck if it falls inside the storm's "strike circle" – a 125-nautical-mile-wide circle centered 12.5 nautical miles to the right of the center. The circle is a rough map of where the worst winds live.

Indirect hit: Places that avoid a direct hit but still take hurricane-force winds or tides at least 4 feet above normal. 

Miriam Guthrie is an associate meteorologist with weather.com who graduated from Georgia Tech with her undergrad and graduate degrees in Earth & Atmospheric Sciences.