Firstly... great image, as usual
As for image maps being cheating
... TER's are essentially image maps.... leaf/bark textures.... flow maps from WM... satellite imagery-derived masks... OMG I'm a cheat
Hands up all those who have used images for stone textures/displacement maps?
Yes I like to do things using procedurals as much as possible, but at the end of the day there are some things you either can't do, or shouldn't do (for performance reasons) using only procedures.
You could animate an image mapped hurricane if you really tried hard enough...
- Generate procedural masks to control the spread of cloud, contrast/black level/ white level of mask image
- Modify mask image between frames with ImageMagick and/or commandline morphing utility to generate variations of the image on the fly
- Add fractal components to cloud mask and animate those
- .. and of course your standard cloud animations
Put them all together and you could generate a reasonable animation. Changing a deep low pressure system into a full blown hurricane using only procedures would also be technically quite difficult as the function describing the hurricane will be different to a mask defining the early stages.
I certainly doubt that there is any competition between the two hurricane models as to which one is better... they're just two different ways of trying to get the same result. I'm watching both with great interest