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.
It seems the outrage is over this part:
Which is, on the face of it, outrageous. American public pays for the modelling but isn’t allowed to benefit from it because an insurance company wants to keep the data secret.
The public does benefit from it because the people who’s jobs it is to protect the public have access to the data.
We’re getting our monies worth, especially if you’ve paid attention to how accurate hurricane tracking and intensity models have become over the past 10+ years.
Sorry, did you mean to reply to another comment? There is no reflection whatsoever to the comment you are replying to.
The above comment is more applicable to itself than to the comment to which it refers, weirdly. It’s a sort of extra-ironic, self unaware recursion.