A major modelling study forecast that warming of the north Atlantic could make hurricanes scarcer - while the worst ones might have stronger winds and produce more rain. Thomas Knutson and colleagues from NASA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, have previously produced a remarkably accurate year-by-year "hindcast" of hurricane numbers over the past 30 years. So their prediction of an 18 per cent decline in the annual hurricane count by late this century commands attention.