Comment by trescenzi
18 hours ago
Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.
18 hours ago
Ironically typhoon forecasting, at this moment, is more valuable. These predictions are matters of life, death, and billions of dollars in damage.
You want to know whats cooler than a billion dollars in damage, a trillion dollars in valuation.
How does predicting a typhoon prevent billions in damage?
It could save thousands of lives because people can be evacuated if you can predict a few hours or a day further ahead, or the path more accurately. You can save some damage by moving ships and vehicles.
But you can't evacuate buildings or infrastructure.
You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days. Crucially, you can move more of the most expensive stuff out of the storm surge zone, which is where the biggest damage happens and try to flood proof more of the things which can’t be moved.
> You can board up a helluva lot more stuff in a week than in two days
TFA says they might be able to predict one extra day ahead (three days instead of two). No prediction system will ever give you a week's notice on a typhoon.
6 replies →
It could save billions by raising confidence in predictions. Bad predictions have a “boy who cried wolf” aspect.
Why does it matter when potus draws the expected path with a sharpie anyway?
I know this is uncharitable and I am wrong but I am having trouble coming up with concrete scenarios where you die with 2 days notice but survive with 3. I am nonethless a believer that more accurate forecasting has value.
You can walk 50km in those extra 24 hours which will save your life if you’re in a storm surge area without other means of transportation, which is easily the case when everyone else is evacuating alongside you.
Could you imagine a scenario where from warning to complete evacuation takes more than two days? Evacuating a whole area is a hard task, particularly once you start looking at more complex problems (elderly, prisons, hospitals).
I feel like the details of this are highly dependent on the confidence of the warning; moving large numbers of people (particularly elderly) will result in some deaths regardless. I guess more time to do it should help though.
We can't save everyone, so let's not bother trying to do better.
The 2 vs 3 days makes less of an impact on personal decision making but has massive benefits for decision making at the country wide response level.
Hurricane Maria went from Cat 2 to Cat 5 in less than 24 hours, and turned making a direct hit to Dominica in 2017.
It was also forecast by virtually every NWP system multiple days ahead of time that it would make this intensification.
It's not uncharitable, because the system doesn't actually claim to give you an extra day of notice. It would be more accurate to say: "the model can reach a given level of forecast accuracy roughly a day farther in advance". So your question becomes: are there scenarios where I am 80% sure this is a Cat 5 hurricane 3 days before, where I would die if I was only 65% sure it was Cat 5 on that same day? The answer is - probably not, because even in the example used in the PR article, the NHC was already issuing strong early guidance 5 days before landfall.
I don't think the amount of notice is as important as "this totally is for sure going to wreck you" is. We generally know something is going to hit somewhere at sometime. Which isn't specific enough for everyone to act on
You live on a chain of small islands and travel by boat.
Imagine you've got to evacuate a hundred thousand people. That extra day is incredibly valuable.
Hurricane blast radius is very small
[dead]
Valuable, agreed. But lucrative?
Are Sol and Fable lucrative? I suspect they also are valuable (to clients) but not lucrative (yet).
I think both have value, but in opposite ways. While WeatherNext prevents costs, models like fable or sol "create profit".
I can think of 10 examples how one could make money with fable. With WeatherNext? Only 10 examples of preventing costs.
Taking this, maybe naive, thought further, profits have no upper limit (except resources) while costs can only save so much?
1 reply →
Trade agricultural futures based on it maybe?
I've always assumed that insurance and/or government departments that would spend money due to storms would be the ones funneling money to these sorts of efforts. It's not exactly something you can easily sell directly to individuals who would benefit. It would be pretty dystopian for them to sell subscriptions for an extra 24 hrs notice on the next typhoon :P
by giving it away they capture none of the value except for some PR.
I agree, but the shareholder mentality undervalues the heck out of that.