However, both studies failed to foresee what is now the country’s largest outbreak — the one among Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York — which is in Brooklyn, not Queens.

(The Lancet authors said their forecasts were correct about two-thirds of the time, as long as counties “spatially adjacent” to the ones they saw as potential hot spots were included.)

In September last year, the virus spread from Ukraine to Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. One month later, Orthodox Jews from New York carried measles almost simultaneously to Brooklyn and to suburban Rockland County, N.Y. The outbreak spread from New York to Orthodox communities in Michigan.

“What we did not calculate at all was that it would come from Israel,” said Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of philosophy and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the new study.

A similar study published last June in PLOS Medicine ranked the risk of measles outbreaks in 18 states with philosophical or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. The research was prescient: almost half the “hotspot” metropolitan areas the scientists noted — particularly Washington State, Texas and Michigan — saw outbreaks this year.

“In the major leagues, that’s an all-star batting average,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, a director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and a co-author of the PLOS Medicine study.

Dr. Hotez and his colleagues did not look at New York State because it does not have “philosophical” exemptions to vaccination, although the state permits religious ones — a loophole that the legislature is considering eliminating.