Social media can be an excellent way to disseminate weather information, but it can also be one of the worst purveyors of weather disinformation, especially when it comes to hurricane forecasting.

Because we’ve all seen the viral posts that show a landfalling hurricane from a whopping 10 days out… but you must take them with a grain of salt (if you take them at all).

Weather forecast model data is widely available across the internet from government agencies, private companies, you name it.

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But when you come across posts on social media that have a single screenshot of one model that has only been run once and yet is warning of a 10-day-away catastrophe, you’re potentially witnessing fear-mongering at its finest.

Here’s why.

Weather modeling has limitations: While numerical modeling and meteorology have advanced by leaps and bounds over the past few decades, things still get pretty uncertain the further out in the forecast you go.

This is particularly true in the tropics, where data to feed the forecast model's initial guess of the current state of the atmosphere is typically more sparse.

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When you add in the basic principle of modeling that initial errors grow with time, you can get a minor discrepancy in the initial position of a storm causing a massive error in the long-range forecasted position.

And that’s for existing storms; models can also predict massive hurricanes in one run only to completely remove the possibility from the next.

It’s good to be wary: To be honest, we’re not fans of calling people out on forecasts.

Also, we love the enthusiasm of legions of weather enthusiasts, some of which will soon attend school to become the next generation of excellent, trusted meteorologists.

But those viral posts warning of a landfall in 10 days can actually do more harm than good, because not only can they create panic where none is needed, they can also eat away at the credibility of meteorology and forecasting science as a whole.

An overabundance of wrong information makes it harder to find the right information, which can cause delays and confusion when it comes to making potentially life-saving decisions.

Here’s what you can do: Always be wary of forecasts posted on social media, especially when they come from an unknown source or don’t have any context or explanation (and a real pro tip is to always be cautious about anything you see on social media, not just forecasts).

Don’t just go around sharing social posts all willy-nilly – check a trusted source like weather.com, the National Weather Service or the National Hurricane Center.

Put it this way, if you sustain an injury, would you simply take home your X-ray, hold it to the light and diagnose a torn ligament without consulting a doctor?

In essence, that's the same thing as posting extended weather model images to social media without qualification or context.

Sara Tonks is a content meteorologist with weather.com and has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from Georgia Tech in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences along with a master’s degree from Unity Environmental University in Marine Science.