On September 16, 2022, Jo Syroka vividly recalls receiving a detailed e-mail from Judith Curry, renowned climatologist and president of Climate Forecast Applications Network. “There is one low rider wave around ten [degrees] north that just left Africa recently that the models like for development around day seven,” Dr Curry wrote.

At the time, Ms Syroka, director of new markets, Fermat Capital Management, and her colleagues took note. That seemingly minor feature — dubbed a “low rider”— would transform into Hurricane Ian, making Florida landfall twelve days later as a major storm.

Reflecting on Dr Curry’s use of “low rider” again in a recent e-mail, Ms Syroka quipped: “I was quite concerned. Hopefully, that's not a foreshadowing for the rest of the season.”

The two spoke yesterday on a panel at ILS Bermuda Convergence 2025, held at Hamilton Princess & Beach Club.

As of yesterday, the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season has produced nine named storms and three hurricanes. Notably, Tropical Storm Chantal was the only storm to make landfall in the United States.

Dr Curry’s expertise lies in sub-seasonal hurricane forecasting — the critical two-to-six-week window filled with both risk and opportunity. She explained that existing models “become less skilful beyond the weather timescale, but each of these timescales has different sources of predictability”.

Her approach, she said, leverages vast ensembles and synthetic tracks, with her company using a Monte Carlo scheme to expand model runs to “12,000 tracks for each storm each day”, providing dynamic “cones of uncertainty” that she said improve long-range forecasting.

However, some storms can rapidly intensify, and those remain a challenge for both physics-based and new artificial intelligence models, she said. “Our new AI indices are outperforming the NHC [National Hurricane Centre] rapid intensification forecast at 24 and 48 hours,” Dr Curry told the audience, while acknowledging that “AI weather emulators … you can run them very quickly … but intensity forecasts … have been pretty useless.”

Meanwhile, the budget proposed for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for fiscal year 2025 could impact weather forecasting, climate research and public safety, with a nearly 40 per cent reduction in funding compared to the previous year.

However, concerns over the potential cuts were tempered by some optimism. Dr Curry pointed to bipartisan momentum behind the Weather Reauthorisation Act, which supports NOAA’s weather research and advancements in weather forecasting and prediction, as well as the prospect for private sector partnerships: “Constellations of small satellites are being launched … providing new data for assimilation into weather forecast models.”

She concluded: “I have to say, I'm cautiously optimistic about where all this is going.”