Information forecasting for hurricane preparation

Hurricane preparation requires decision makers to call for costly and disruptive actions---such as a sortie of a fleet or the evacuation of a population center---on the basis of forecasts that can never be 100% accurate. In order make the trade-off between the effectiveness of early preparation against the improved accuracy of updated forecasts, decision makers must have an assessment of the value of waiting and the improvement in the forecast that can be anticipated if they wait. One approach is to develop an information forecast that quantifies how information about a relevant weather event will improve in the future, or equivalently, how uncertainty will be resolved. Quantifying this attribute of information about storms and supplementing hurricane forecasts with the additional dimension of an information forecast can help in refining preparation policies to make them less expensive. This work develops an information forecast and explores its potential use. In real-time decision-making, forecasts of improving information quality could be used in combination with strike probability forecasts to evaluate the trade-off between lead-time and forecast accuracy, estimate the value of waiting for improving forecasts, and thereby reduce false alarms.