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.
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.
Muwahahahaha!!! - Our corporate overlords, probably
This is actually the opposite of privatization. The government is using private technology that they will be able to make public in 5 years.
That’s a bit late for a weather forecast.
It worked in high growth economy 50-70’, and boomers are stuck there.
It really didn’t even work then, those at the time just offloaded the real cost of their policies to the contemporary poor and current entirety of the population.