HURRICANE CENTRE NOT TO RECEIVE KEY INFO THIS SEASON FROM FSU

With hurricane season here again, it may bother some folks that for the first time this decade, the National Hurricane Centre will be without a consistantly key element of forecasting intensity and direction of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Florida State University has sold the commercial rights to it's patented technology of the acclaimed Superensemble computer forecasting model to Weather Perfect, a North Carolina-based company. It has reportedly held those rights for some time, allowing FSU to continue provide data free to the NHC because the company was not yet ready to market the forecasts commercially. That has apparantly changed, so Florida State officials have been instructed to stop providing data free to the Miami-based hurricane centre.

The hurricane centre uses a number of forecast models in predicting tropical storms and hurricanes, but the Superensemble information has been among the most consistantly accurate. According to the National Weather Service, the FSU model was the most accurate in 1994 and one of the best during last year's busy hurricane season.

Where the Superensemble seems to do best is forecasting the intenfisication of a storm, considered one of the most difficult aspects in forecasting.

The NHC can still have access to the data...but it'll have to pay for it now.

UPDATE / 06/09 - 06:28 AM: The word is that now, Weather Predict and FSU has reached an agreement to supply the National Hurricane Center information from the Superensemble at no charge. Things got moving after NHC Director Max Mayfield pled with FSU President T.K. Wetherell to help resolve the issue.