Insurance rates going up? Blame this Brit

Now, when he talks, insurance companies listen, and your rates stand to go up.

The best hurricane season forecasts for the past few years didn't come from the weather experts who issue storm warnings in the United States.

They came from three climate guys who work from an English country house 20 miles southwest of London, a place hurricanes don't hit. …

It's where scientist Mark Saunders [UCL Space & Climate Physics] and his team study hurricanes and make seasonal predictions that are besting those of the U.S. government. In 2005, his team outperformed every other prognosticator, missing the actual number of storms for the record-shattering season by six.

Like about a half-dozen other long-range forecasters, Saunders looks at weather conditions before each hurricane season and tries to divine how many storms will form and how strong they will be. …

In England, Saunders and his team are known for their cutting-edge research and forecasting success.

"We've got the world's biggest insurance market, and they want access to the best risk information," Saunders said. …

Saunders began his scientific career studying things light-years away from hurricanes, literally.

He taught astrophysics, focusing mainly on the study of the outer planets.

But he wanted to do something a bit closer to home, and his curiosity about what causes busy hurricane seasons led him to forecasting.

In 1997, he proposed a theory that today seems so commonplace it's hard to imagine it is a relatively recent discovery. …

It was Saunders who showed the link between water temperature and the number of storms that form in a given year. In its most simplistic form, the equation reads: the warmer the oceans, the more storms form. …

But Saunders isn't like most other forecasters. He, like a handful of others, has forged a business relationship that funds his research and makes his scientific discoveries relevant to millions around the world.

When he's not in his office or surrounded by computers, Saunders is shuttling between the office and his backers in London, where his long-range forecasts help some of the world's largest reinsurance brokers and companies assess risk from tropical storms worldwide.

"They sponsored a project to look at long-range predictions . ... That was in 1998, and we started out with some pretty accurate forecasts right away," Saunders said. "Beginner's luck maybe."

In 2000, two insurance companies began sponsoring Saunders' work and Tropical Storm Risk, a consortium of climate forecasters, insurance and risk management experts was formed. …

All long-range forecasters have unique ways of building their seasonal forecasts. …

Saunders landed on two indicators:

• warmer-than-average waters off the coast of Africa, where most storms form, lead to more hurricanes.
• lighter-than-average easterly trade winds blowing across the tropical Atlantic between Africa and the Caribbean allow more storms to thrive.

"If you predict those perfectly each year, you get very good skill," Saunders says. …

Along with the overall numbers of hurricanes and general storm activity, Saunders also makes a general call about how many storms will hit land. It's the part of his forecast that he's honing to make even more precise.

"Where the benefits are coming are for landfall activity, to actually predict loss and damage ahead of time," he said. …

Before storms form, Saunders and his team will forecast how likely one of three regions - the U.S. East Coast, the Gulf Coast or the Caribbean - are to see higher-than-normal storm activity.

Several scientists already make similar predictions. But because Saunders' seasonal predictions have done so well, people are watching to see if he has the same success predicting what coastlines are most at risk. …

The work of Tropical Storm Risk takes in a lot more than the Atlantic hurricane outlook.

The team makes seasonal predictions for Australia and the western Pacific, and forecasts where the worst winds will hit from a given storm as well as tracking each storm.

TSR's Web site, tsr.mssl.ucl.ac.uk, allows its corporate sponsors to figure risk from a given storm and helps relief agencies, including the United Nations' World Food Program, plan for recovery efforts. …

Cathy Zollo, 'Sarasota Herald-Tribune' (Florida)