Catastrophe prediction is a risky business. Hurricanes, tornadoes, wind storms, earthquakes, tsunamis - almost never happen the way people want them to. These storms don't follow our rules, they don't even know the rules.

But those involved in catastrophe reinsurance must fine-tune their business models to predict these chaotic events of nature as closely as possible. And they must have the best information available in order to minimise their risks.

The tools available to reinsurers are improving - and that is partially due to a business-science partnership that has been developed at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research (BBSR).

Today, scientists and reinsurers will meet for the BBSR's annual Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI) meetings where the business community will be apprised of the latest scientific findings crucial to their operations.

Among the topics they will discuss are the frequency of European wind storms, the historical record of hurricanes making landfalls in the Northeast of the US and whether it would be possible for a hurricane higher than category three to make landfall there, RPI science programme manager Dr. Rick Murnane told The Royal Gazette.

Reinsurers will take this information and adjust their models and predictions accordingly, minimising their loss risks.

Dr. Murnane said reinsurers took a severe hit from European windstorms in 1990 and 1999 which has spurred renewed interest in research on these weather phenomena.

"They lost billions from storms in December 1999," said Dr. Murnane. "Way more than their models showed they were likely to lose. That was what got people interested in finding out more about European wind storms."

Today, business leaders will hear that there does seem to be evidence that the storms occur in clusters, which should improve their predictability.

They will also hear that the probability of hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast has doubled.

The partnership has been a win-win situation with scientists finding a practical use for their studies which can draw funding to continue their work and reinsurers gaining one-on-one contact with the researchers working on the frontline of catastrophe studies.

As a result seven locally-connected re/insurance companies have joined RPI - with AXIS and Montpelier Re being newcomers to the group this year.

"For a company like ourselves RPI was an attractive project," Ren Re vice president and COO Bill Riker said:

"What RPI has done is provide the business community much better access to information which can be relevant to our business that is being created by the scientific community.

"People in the academic community are doing all kinds of projects, some of which are very relevant to our business, but no one put this all together, put us all together until RPI.

"It also made the academic community aware there was some business interest in what they were researching."

Mr. Riker said that in the past reinsurers would read about hurricane predictions in the newspapers but the finer details of what the predictions meant were less available to them.

"We'd read that it was going to be a big year for hurricanes and that was it," Mr. Riker said. "Now we hear how these hurricanes change their behaviours and have more useful information."

Dr. Murnane also told The Royal Gazette that hurricane tracking prediction was becoming much more accurate, partially due to data collected in active hurricane through the use of GPS drop-sondes.