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The best hurricane forecasting systems today are global models that solve the mathematical equations about the behavior of the atmosphere all over the world, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, a research group he founded.

Tops among half a dozen of these systems in recent years has been the ECMWF, the European Union’s super-computing system. The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting, known to those in the trade as the "European Model," has used very high-powered computers for more than a decade to model weather patterns around the globe.

The models, known as four-dimensional variational data assimilations (or 4D-Var) are expensive and take longer to assemble — producing two projections a day compared to the faster modeling systems run in the United States, which produce four or more projections every 24 hours.

The results from the private European system are available only to subscribers and are costly, but experts said they have been the most reliable in recent years.