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.
Can we please stop with the privitization? It’s absolutely not been working out very well for the people.
This is actually the opposite of privatization. The government is using private technology that they will be able to make public in 5 years.
they will be able to make public in 5 years.
That’s a bit late for a weather forecast.
Well they are taking something owned by a foreign company - i.e. owned by people who are not Americans - and creating a system that will help Americans.
I wish NOAA or NASA invented it, then we would have it now. But, in this case, private investment happened to be fastest.
Wishing is not much of a plan.
The actual alternative available to the US Government that would have prevented this angry response would have been to not even try to adapt this private technology.
Would that have been better?
But it makes so much money for corporations! Tax payer money is used for research and everything else that costs money, then we get a private company to just ‘commercialise’ it! Tax payers take on all the risk and investment, profits go straight to shareholders.
If true, this is fucked.
They don’t want average joe to get out ahead of the corporations. Could be bad for business!
It’s not even close to the level bullshit that has gov’t funding drug research, and then getting gouged by drug companies. That doesn’t make it right. I hate this on principle, but on a pragmatic level I doubt the difference from the many current models is noticeable other than on a trivial statistical level. That said, it does really piss me off as a matter of principle.
This may well cost people their lives
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.
