Hurricane and tropical storm warnings and watches will be coming—slightly earlier—to a coastline near you. The National Hurricane Center will begin issuing the alerts about 12 hours before it previously did thanks to advances in forecasting, according to a statement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"It's really just the result of the accumulated improvements over time — the track forecasts have been getting better incrementally year after year," Chief Hurricane Specialist James Franklin told the Associated Press. "And there's been enough of an improvement now that we can feel comfortable increasing it."

NOAA has said the changes, which will go into effect May 15, will give emergency officials and residents more time to prepare for storms or evacuate. But at least one emergency manager doesn’t think the 12-hour lead will make much difference.

"The watches and warnings, they're great for public perception, but for emergency managers they're not terribly important for decision-making because we're on top of it already," Clayton Scott, chief hurricane planner for Savannah and surrounding Chatham County on the Georgia coast, told the AP.

Early alerts aren’t the only tricks NOAA has up its sleeve. Last year, the administration began experimenting with new ways to communicate hurricane intensity. An experimental version of the traditional Saffir-Simpson scale, known as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, would assess only wind speed, avoiding the underestimation of storm surge factors. For more information on the experimental scale, visit the National Hurricane Center website.