Scientists hope to improve hurricane forecasting with new government investment

Atlantic hurricane season starts this week on June 1, and runs through November. NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is predicting it’ll be a year of above-normal hurricane activity.

Climate change is making all kinds of extreme weather more common, and the Joe Biden administration recently announced $6.6 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that will go toward efforts to improve weather forecasting.

Long-range, seasonal forecasts aren’t all that useful — at least not according to former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.

But once a storm forms, he said then the forecasts really matter. “It’s life or death. The better that forecast is and the more time we can give communities, the better the outcome.”

Forecasting has come a long way in the last few decades. Today, “the five-day forecast is as accurate, if not more accurate, than the three-day forecast was in 1987,” Fugate said.

That has saved both lives and money, according to Renato Molina at the University of Miami.

“Having accurate information, we estimate, has saved about 20% of the overall damages to property and crops in the last 20 years for the United States,” he said.

Even so, “extreme weather causes hundreds of deaths and hundreds of billion dollars in damage every year, noted Xuguang Wang at the University of Oklahoma, who will head up the new consortium that just got federal funding to do research to improve forecasts.

“Increasing weather extremes will threaten our sources of food, water, energy and economic well-being,” she said.

And, Wang added, more accurate forecasting can help reduce future damage.