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Colorado State University’s hurricane research team, perhaps the best-known and most-often quoted forecasting service, 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 service 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 ¾ÅÉ« recently.

Dilley and his GWO website claim as much as 90% accuracy, sometimes calculated years in advance. And many of 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 really 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-based consulting and inspection firm that verifies that structures are built to wind-resistant standards.

As a 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 being 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.

The problem, as he sees it, is that few people, including insurance executives, seem know about GWO, even though the firm has been in operation since 1992. That’s largely because, Dilley believes, most news media outlets have shied away from him once they discover that he is not a big believer in the impact of global warming on hurricane formation. Few news articles, in fact, can be found about GWO in recent years. A 2013 article in the Ocala StarBanner newspaper quoted one NWS meteorologist as suggesting that Dilley’s predictions might be as much the result of luck as science.

Hugh Willoughby, a professor at Florida International University’s Department of Earth and Environment, which has helped develop hurricane loss models, said he was unfamiliar with Dilley’s work. Willoughby noted that many forecasts that try to predict weather events years in advance are “on the frontier of psuedoscience.”

But Dilley, who holds a master’s degree in meteorology from Rutgers University, argues that larger forces than man-made climate change are at work.

“It’s a natural cycle, not global warming,” he said.

He calls his modeling system ClimatePulse Technology, based on 150 years of weather data and thousands of years of geological data. The number of storms rises and falls on a 70-year cycle that is mostly influenced by electromagnetic and gravitational forces, including the interplay of the orbital cycles of the Earth, Sun and Moon, he said. Other cycles run for thousands of years and have an impact on temperatures, rainfall and more, Dilley said.

This year, other factors are having an influence, making a slow start to the 2025 hurricane season: Large dust clouds from the Saharan Desert, moving west across the Caribbean Sea, have led to drier air high in the atmosphere, which has reduced moisture and energy for hurricanes. A wild card, he noted, is, in fact rising ocean temperatures (from cyclical forces, not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere). While he predicts one good storm will strike Florida in coming months, he said it could be as many as three, because with a warming Gulf of Mexico, storms can rapidly spin up from minor to major, almost overnight, as happened with Hurricane Milton in 2024.

Dilley also warned that it’s not just the Southeastern states that need to worry about major storms. His modeling shows that in coming years, the Northeastern United States is due for a significant hurricane, perhaps on the scale of the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which killed some 680 people and caused an estimated $300 million in damage, according to news reports.

By 2030, the global cycles will bring cooler ocean temperatures, he noted. But that doesn’t mean the United States won’t see at least some powerful storms. He argued that Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm that slammed south Florida in 1992, came during a period of slightly cooler water temperatures.

Dilley’s frustration about his company’s lack of visibility may be about to change. He said GWO is on the cusp of being purchased by a major U.S. weather forecast service, perhaps as soon as this month. He declined to name the company but said the merger would likely give his hurricane models much more exposure.

Top photo: Adobe Stock image (AI-generated).

Topics Catastrophe Natural Disasters Florida Hurricane