Colorado State University’s hurricane research team, perhaps the best-known and most-often quoted forecasting s
ervice, last week revised its prediction for the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season downward slightly – to eight hurricanes, three of them major.
That’s almost in line with another, lesser-known forecast service known as Global Weather Oscillations, led by former National Weather Service and U.S.
Air Force meteorologist David Dilley, with offices in Ocala and Tampa, Florida. Dilley’s model takes it a step further and predicts where the hurricanes will make landfall, within 100 miles or so.
He’s calling for one hurricane to hit Florida this season but he can’t reveal exactly which area because his se
rvice is subscription-based, with zoned predictions that cost $400 a year.
“It wouldn’t be fair to customers who have purchased subscriptions” to say publicly where the storms will hit, he told Insurance Journal recently.
Dilley
Dilley and his GWO website claim as much as 90% accuracy, sometimes calculated years in advance. And many o
f his 200 or so subscribers appear to be true believers, with 80% of them return customers.
“I’ve been buying the GWO forecasts for several years now and it’s re
ally good to know what to expect each hurricane season in advance of the other forecasting agencies,” said Darius Grimes, CEO of Disaster-Smart, a Florida-bas
ed consulting and inspection firm that verifies that structures are built to wind-resistant standards.
Watch More Image Part 2 >>>
As an example of his models’ accuracy, Dilley told the story of Hurricane Irma, which raked part of Florida in 2017 and left more than 1 million property insurance claims in its wake, some of which are still be
ing litigated. Dilley said that other hurricane forecasting services had predicted Irma would hit Florida’s east coast.
GWO’s models had it going instead to Florida’s southwestern tip and up the state’s western flank. Dilley was proven right.
“My customers were better prepared,” he said.
Just two insurance companies have subscribed to Dilley’s service in recent years, though. One of those is Florida’s state-created Citizens Property Insurance Corp. A spokesman for the carrier declined to comment, except to say Citizens does not endorse products and does not use the GWO forecasts in rate setting.
But Dilley said that Citizens benefits from the GWO modeling, and more insurers in the Southeast should get on board: Knowing where and when a major storm will hit can help carriers in purchasing adequate reinsurance and in extending coverage or contemplating policy renewals.