Hurricane-prone communities may soon be able to plan their defences 10 years in advance.

Currently, forecasters only issue predictions one hurricane season ahead. Doug Smith at the UK Met Office fed key data such as ocean temperatures, air pressure and wind speeds for every year from 1960 to 1995 into DePreSys, a model currently used to make general decadal predictions.

The number of Atlantic hurricanes in the study period varied from three to 15. DePreSys’s predictions, made for 10 years on from the date of the historical data, were on average within 19 per cent of the actual numbers. The team is now working on real predictions.

However, the big challenge will be to predict hurricane intensity, says Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1004