New study finds this company most accurate for hurricane predictions. Is it right?

Yahoo

29-05-2025

As the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season approaches, it is vitally important for Floridians who are potentially in the line of fire to have the most accurate, up-to-date weather information available.
A new study by London-based marketing and analytics firm Kantar suggests that it might come from AccuWeather.
Based on forecasts during the 2024 Atlantic season, Kantar determined that "AccuWeather's forecasts are, on average, the most accurate, the best communicated, and overall the most useful for people to make the best decisions to protect life and property."
However, other meteorologists pointed out problems with Kantar's report.
"The AccuWeather 'study' makes claims about their forecast skill that cannot be falsified, and thus are not scientific," said Dr. Ryan Truchelut, co-founder, president, and chief meteorologist of Tallahassee-based weather forecasting company WeatherTiger.
"Without offering a study methodology to scrutinize, there is no way to evaluate the so-called findings in the slide deck, other than to say the document overall reads like something put together by consultants with no background in meteorology, working backwards from a conclusion," Truchelut said in an email.
"As Accuweather does not issue detailed track and intensity forecasts to the public each 6 hours as the NHC does, there is no independent means of verifying their forecasts, as the NHC rigorously does after each season."
Other critics pointed out that the report seemingly does not include false positives where AccuWeather forecasted system developments that never happened, the study looked at only one year, and it may not have compared apples to apples in the data.
"The report is an exercise in marketing and self-aggrandizement, and nothing else," Truchelut said. "Furthermore, it is also in extraordinarily ill taste to attack the NHC now, with NOAA and the NWS suffering continued cuts."
The report comes as the Trump administration has made drastic cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Service, among other agencies.
More than 550 of the 4,800 weather service employees have been dismissed, retired or accepted incentive offers to step down, leaving many of the forecast offices shorthanded with staff reductions from 20-40% and scrambling to cover staffing and maintain the usual quality and number of measurements. Several offices were forced to end weather balloon launches, which can reduce the agency's ability to predict weather, and CNN reported on May 2 that 30 NWS offices no longer had a lead meteorologist.
'This has never happened before. We've always been an agency that has provided 24/7 service to the American public,' Tom Fahy, legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, told ABC News. 'The risk is extremely high — if cuts like this continue to the National Weather Service, people will die.'
Weather forecasts: Trump cuts leave National Weather Service scrambling to cover vital shifts
Project 2025, the conservative roadmap and wishlist from right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation, calls for NOAA to be broken up due to its position in the "climate change alarm industry" and says the government should charge for National Weather Service data that is currently free.
Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, but many of his initiatives mirror or surpass the project's goals and he has placed some of its writers into administrative positions including key author Russell Vought, now the Trump administration's budget office director.
The study concluded, after analyzing coverage of all storms during the 2024 season, that AccuWeather was, on average:
6.2% more accurate than the NHC and other sources for track forecasts
8.9% more accurate for storms that made landfall
8.6% more accurate for landfall location prediction
37.8% more accurate for landfall intensity forecasts
4% more accurate for maximum wind intensity forecasts
Kantar said AccuWeather's storm track and intensity forecasts extended 25 hours further into the future than the NHC and all other sources for all 2024 storms, and 31 hours further into the future for those that made U.S. landfall. It also praised AccuWeather's proprietary RealImpact Scale for communicating the potential dangers of hurricanes as compared to the standard Saffir-Simpson Scale, which only measures windspeed.
"We are very gratified by these results, which further support our mission of saving lives and protecting property," said AccuWeather Founder and Executive Chairman Dr. Joel N. Myers in a release. "This historic report marks the first time a third-party has verified that another source has been more accurate and more effective in predicting hurricanes and their impacts than NOAA's National Hurricane Center."
Not everyone took the report at face value.
"With professional respect to my colleagues at AccuWeather, this is a study *paid for* by AccuWeather that uses highly questionable methods and makes a number of false claims," Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for the Washington Post, in a series of posts on X.
"AccuWeather claims to win 'all landfalling storms,' presumably with a U.S. bias... ...which allows them to completely throw out their absolutely erroneous forecast of a high-end Category 2 slamming into Florida. (It died over the Yucatan as a T.S.)," he said, referring to Tropical Storm Sara, a November 2024 storm that made landfall in Central America.
"Case in point," Cappucci said. "AccuWeather wants to make a case that they were right from the beginning with regard to Francine, but then sweep many other forecasts, like that of Sara, under the rug."
Dr. Levi Cowan, FSU meteorology grad and owner of forecast site tropicaltidbits.com, pointed out that the report analyzed forecasts at 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 84 and 108 hours from the issued time.
"But @NHC_Atlantic issues forecasts at lead times of 12, 24, 36, 48, 60, 72, 96, and 120 hours, making it unclear exactly how this analysis was done," he said in an X post. "Was interpolation of some data to a different set of lead times performed? Was mean absolute error or some other metric used? We don't know, because the report is opaque."
In a release, AccuWeather Chief Meteorologist Jonathan Porter said that the important foundational work of the National Hurricane Center should in no way be disregarded. But AccuWeather, unlike most other weather services, uses its own data as well as data from the NHC.
"The agency provides a vital life-saving service," he said. "Our work complements this effort and state and local agencies and companies that need the most accurate forecast of hurricane tracks and impacts ranging from storm surge to rain flooding to tornadoes to wind and water damage, we are not discouraging the use of the National Hurricane Center and the National Weather Service forecasts, but if you want the best and access to expert consulting meteorologists that you can speak to at any time 24/7, AccuWeather is the answer."
AccuWeather is predicting the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season could bring:
Named storms: 13 to 18
Hurricanes: 7-10
Major hurricanes: 3-5
Direct U.S. impacts: 3-6
NOAA is predicting a 60% chance of an above-normal season, a 30% chance of a near-normal season and a 10% chance for a below-normal season. Forecasters predict:
Named storms: 13-19
Hurricanes: 6-10
Major hurricanes: 3-5
Colorado State University meteorologists predict:
17 named storms
9 hurricanes
4 major hurricanes
Dr. Ryan Truchelut of WeatherTiger hedged his bets and predicted that the 2025 season has a 50-50 chance of landing in the ranges of:
16-21 tropical storms
7-9 hurricanes
3-4 major hurricanes
Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY, and Cheryl McCloud, USA TODAY NETWORK - Florida contributed to this story.
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Is AccuWeather more accurate than NHC? Critics call study unscientific