Natural disasters, man-made disasters and all sorts of extraordinary events are terrible for their suddenness and huge destructive power. However, such definitions of dangerous situations as "spontaneity" and "catastrophic" are somewhat relative, since there is a forecast of the event. It is part of the process of managing the risk of occurrence and the magnitude of the consequences of dangerous and emergency situations.
Surely, many were faced with a situation when an alert (whether it’s information channels, the media or mass SMS) passes a warning about abnormal climatic natural phenomena. For example, a storm warning was announced, and in the courtyard both the weather stood and the weather was clear. And vice versa, all reference services show a good day, and from nowhere a squally wind and a hurricane. This is by no means a reason to scold the relevant services, but the consequence of the fact that forecasting dangerous situations is probabilistic. The reliability of such predictions is far from the indicator, which experts call a "stable reliable forecast."
Forecasting and its performance
About twenty years ago, an expert laboratory was created at the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which conducted an experiment to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the forecasts used. All involved organizations and individuals were invited — from famous scholars to sorcerers. 3460 predictions for 70 subjects of forecasting were analyzed. The accuracy of the match ranged from 13 to 32 percent.
Opinions of specialists, scientific publications and official documents of a more global format of this kind of data do not contain. Basically, qualitative assessments are given, for example, “the degree of reliability of possible risks is still not high, ” “there are successes, but no breakthrough is visible, ” etc. Thus, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report noted: “The uncertainty in the prognostic estimates is still very large.”
