Weather forecasts save lives And I have good news: After the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, our forecasts started rapidly improving:

When a hurricane is approaching, those in the line of the storm and authorities tasked with helping them—like FEMA—need to know how bad things are going to get. When they overestimate how bad things will get, things go better; when they underestimate, they go worse:

The real cost of an inaccurate forecast is potentially billions of dollars in direct damage, sizable portions of local GDP, major losses on a personal basis, and even people's lives. To minimize losses, when FEMA gets word of a severe storm, they throw more money at it:

Not only does FEMA provide additional money in light of the news that a storm with strong winds is coming (A), but even whenever places expect a surprisingly large amount of rain (B) and the floods that brings:

When FEMA overprepares, the amount of recovery spending required afterwards is smaller. Likewise, when they underprepare, that means more recovery spending, and the amounts are lopsided: Being overprepared likely doesn't save as much money as being underprepared loses.

Let's look at a real example. On the top left, you'll see wind speed estimates for Hurricane Katrina. On the top right, the standard deviation of the estimates. On the bottom, you'll see the extent of underestimates. The most devastated areas got the worst underestimation.

The immediate thing the government did was send in aid workers. If you were alive at the time, you probably remember thinking the efforts weren't enough. They might not have been, but those workers did put in a lot of effort and they really tried to make things better.

The failure to protect residents of Louisiana from the storm, in addition to the feelings of failure after Charley, Wilma, and Rita, led the NOAA to finally put their foot down and establish the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program. This is its impact evaluation. It worked.

Thanks to the technological improvements that followed the advent of the HFIP, lives and property have been saved, and the economic devastation due to each individual storm has been reduced substantially, although the prices remain high. So thank NOAA for the weather reports!

Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32548 And if you want to learn more about HFIP, see: https://vlab.noaa.gov/web/osti-modeling/hfip//about…