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.
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?