SIPA's Jeff Shrader on Weather Forecasting

For many years, SIPA professor Jeff Shrader has been trying to better understand the economic damages from climate change. Given that the world has already warmed substantially over recent decades and will continue to warm (especially in the absence of strong mitigation policy), a crucial question is: how well can people adapt to rising temperatures? 

The good news is that people already have some ways to protect themselves from extreme heat. One important lesson learned from prior experience is that early warning systems—such as weather forecasts and heat alerts—can play an important role in helping protect people from deadly heat. In his research on National Weather Service Forecasts, Shrader and his co-authors show that the improvements in forecast accuracy over the last couple of decades have saved thousands of lives in the United States, mostly by helping people reduce their exposure to deadly heat.

In new work, funded by ISERP, Shrader and his co-authors are trying to understand how forecasts might evolve in the future and what that evolution implies for the impacts of climate change. In a forthcoming paper in PNAS, they estimate how forecast accuracy and temperatures will change over the next 75 years and find that climate change makes accurate forecasts even more important as a tool to facilitate protective adaptation on hot days. 

They are also looking at how the changing landscape of forecasts might affect accuracy and information provision. In recent years, novel AI-driven forecasts have proven to be as accurate as some traditional, physics-based models (which are themselves a marvel of modern science and computation). At the same time, some companies and policymakers have pushed for the privatization of aspects of weather forecasting, in part by arguing that the private sector can now fulfill some of the roles of government forecasting agencies. Using their ISERP grant, Shrader and his co-authors acquired a unique, multi-decade database of government and private-sector-issued weather forecasts so that they can document some basic patterns about how these forecasters differ. For example: do private sector forecasts incorporate innovations faster than government forecasts? Or do they try to provide a false sense of precision to gain market share? They hope this research can help guide effective public and private investment in the next generation of weather forecasts. 

You can read more about Prof. Shrader and his team's work in PNAS here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2523372123