65 percent chance another hurricane will make US landfall this season

Mark Roulston, Senior Data Scientist • 15 Oct 2020

During the evening of Friday 9th October Hurricane Delta made landfall on the coast of Louisiana as a category 2 storm, very close to where Hurricane Laura made landfall in August. Delta was the fifth hurricane to make landfall over the United States this year but, according to our expert prediction market for hurricane activity, there is a 2-in-3 chance it will not be the last.

The prediction market is being run on Hivemind’s AGORA platform as part of our participation in the fifth Cohort of the Lloyd’s Lab programme for InsurTech start-ups. The participants in the market are experts in the fields of meteorology, climatology and statistics. They are buying and selling contracts related to the number of landfalling hurricanes. While these experts are using virtual currency, those who make the largest contributions to the forecast in terms of accuracy and timeliness will ultimately be rewarded with cash rewards courtesy of Lloyd’s Lab.

So far the 2020 hurricane season has been particularly active, with 25 named storms, including 9 that became hurricanes. Our prediction market closes on November 30th when the Atlantic hurricane season officially ends, with the final results being posted on our blog shortly afterwards. Until then here’s where you can view the live prices on AGORA for the 2020 landfalling hurricanes prediction market.

The next step for us is to test the prediction market concept for extracting and aggregating pre-season predictions into a unified probabilistic forecast of hurricane risk by opening a market for the 2021 season before the end of this year. If you would like to participate in this 2021 market, let us know.