The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cannot reveal weather forecasts from a particularly accurate hurricane prediction model to the public that pays for the American government agency – because of a deal with a private insurance risk firm.
The model at issue is called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) Corrected Consensus Approach (HCCA). In 2023, it was deemed in a National Hurricane Center (NHC) report [PDF] to be one of the two “best performers,” the other being a model called IVCN (Intensity Variable Consensus).
2020 contract between NOAA and RenaissanceRe Risk Sciences, disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, requires NOAA to keep HCCA forecasts – which incorporate a proprietary technique from RenaissanceRe – secret for five years.
They can’t reveal the model itself for 5 years but can obviously give the resulting forecast from it, so I don’t really see the big deal here. It’d be nice if it was freely available, but it’s not like the average person can use it without lots of knowledge and scientific equipment of their own and 5 years isn’t very long.
My guy, it says right there, twice:
This fuckin’ guy 🤦
What about every other country on the planet?
Do many of them get hit with hurricanes?
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Sahara desert hit by extraordinary rainfall event that could mess with this year’s hurricane season
What are typhoons?