Sometimes seen as a cryptic oracle of the economy, the Federal Reserve is overhauling the way it communicates with Congress and the public.

The Fed has in the past made its projections of economic growth, unemployment, and inflation twice a year, in February and July, when its chairman appears before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

The Fed will now increase those projections to four times a year. And it will look out to the next three years, instead of two. It will also publish projections for overall inflation, which includes food and energy costs, as well as core inflation, which excludes them.

Summaries and explanations of the projections will be released along with minutes of the Fed policy meetings at which they were discussed.

“These descriptions will provide a fuller discussion of the projections, covering not only the outcomes that most meeting participants see as most likely, but also the risks to the economic outlook and the dispersion of views among policymakers,” the Fed said.

The first publications will be issued on Tuesday, when the Fed releases the minutes of the interest-rate meeting of October 30-31.

In a speech this morning at the Cato Institute’s Monetary Conference in Washington, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Fed, said that “good communications are a prerequisite if central banks are to maintain the democratic legitimacy and independence that are essential to sound monetary policymaking.”

One of the objectives of the new communications policy, said Bernanke, is to help the financial markets have a better understanding of what the Fed is doing.

“If market participants understand that arriving information about the economy increases the likelihood of certain policy actions, then market interest rates will tend to move in a way that reinforces the expected actions, effectively supporting the goals of the central bank,” he said.

Bernanke cautioned that the changes were not a prelude to adopting inflation targeting. “Some aspects of inflation targeting may be less well suited to the Federal Reserve’s mandate and policy practice,” he said.