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.

  • henfredemars
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    203
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 months ago

    Can we please stop with the privitization? It’s absolutely not been working out very well for the people.

    • jonne
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      12
      ·
      2 months ago

      This is actually the opposite of privatization. The government is using private technology that they will be able to make public in 5 years.

      • kent_eh@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        25
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        2 months ago

        they will be able to make public in 5 years.

        That’s a bit late for a weather forecast.

        • RestrictedAccount@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 months ago

          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?

    • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      11
      ·
      2 months ago

      It worked in high growth economy 50-70’, and boomers are stuck there.