#national weather service

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dharna Noor at The Guardian:

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen. The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president. The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming. The guidebook chapter detailing the strategy, which was recently spotlighted by E&E News, describes Noaa as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity”. It was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler executive who during Trump’s presidency was chief financial officer for Noaa’s parent body, the commerce department. Gilman writes that one of Noaa’s six main offices, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be “disbanded” because it issues “theoretical” science and is “the source of much of Noaa’s climate alarmism”. Though he admits it serves “important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions”, Gilman says data from the National Hurricane Center must be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”.

[...] Noaa also houses the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. Gilman calls for the service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations”. He goes on to say that Americans are already reliant on private weather forecasters, specifically naming AccuWeather and citing a PR release issued by the company to claim that “studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable” than the public sector’s. (The mention is noteworthy as Trump once tapped the former CEO of AccuWeather to lead Noaa, though his nomination was soon withdrawn.)

The claims come amid years of attempts from US conservatives to help private companies enter the forecasting arena – proposals that are “nonsense”, said Rosenberg. Right now, all people can access high-quality forecasts for free through the NWS. But if forecasts were conducted only by private companies that have a profit motive, crucial programming might no longer be available to those in whom business executives don’t see value, said Rosenberg. [...] Fully privatizing forecasting could also threaten the accuracy of forecasts, said Gloninger, who pointed to AccuWeather’s well-known 30- and 60-day forecasts as one example. Analysts have found that these forecasts are only right about half the time, since peer-reviewed research has found that there is an eight- to 10-day limit on the accuracy of forecasts.

The Trump Administration is delivering a big gift to climate crisis denialism as part of Project 2025 by proposing the dismantling and privatizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) in his potential 2nd term.

This should frighten people to vote Democratic up and down the ballot if you want the NOAA and NWS to stay intact.

[just-my-insufferable-existance]

I'm taking a skywarn class this evening; I might write about it later in my blog, regardless of interest. That being said I think I'll have a chance to talk to an NWS meteorologist. I'm all ears for good questions.

[contac]

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

About 100 million Americans from California to New England were sweating through heat advisories and warnings from the National Weather Service on Wednesday, with a brutal heat wave across the central part of the country showing no signs of letting up.

Heat warnings and advisories were in place for parts or all of 28 states. People in the Southeast and the Southern Plains faced the most oppressive temperatures, with triple digits forecast for Wednesday and beyond across parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, said Andrew Orrison, a Weather Service meteorologist.

Oklahoma City broke a daily heat record dating back to the Dust Bowl era on Tuesday with a temperature of 110 — tied for the state’s highest-ever July temperature, the Weather Service said — and Austin is set on Wednesday to see its 40th straight day of highs over 100 degrees.

“These are definitely dangerous heat conditions,” Mr. Orrison said.

The Dallas area has seen 24 days of triple-digit heat so far this year, including 15 in July, and highs there are forecast to top 100 every day for the next week. The average number of 100-plus-degree days in Dallas for an entire year is 20, said Madison Gordon, a Weather Service meteorologist.

The extended heat and lack of rain has caused the ground to shift in Fort Worth, Texas, causing nearly 200 water main breaks over the last month. And Oklahoma’s largest ambulance service said earlier this week that it had seen a surge in heat-related health emergencies in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

On the East Coast, heat advisories are in place along much of the Interstate 95 corridor from Philadelphia to Boston, as well as across parts of upstate New York and southern New England. Actual highs will be in the mid-to-upper 90s, while heat indexes will reach 105 degrees. With the heat expected to intensify through the weekend, several cities opened cooling centers for residents.

It’s difficult to blame any particular heat snap on climate change without extensive scientific analysis, but heat waves like the ones in Europe, Asia and North America this summer are typical of what scientists expect as the globe warms — more frequent, longer lasting and more dangerous.

Heat waves in the United States jumped from an average of two per year in the 1960s to six per year by the 2010s. And it’s all part of an overall warming trend: The last seven years have been the warmest in the history of accurate worldwide records.

[reasonandfaithinharmony]

He chose chaos

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.

Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.

The plan to “break up NOAA” is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.

The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.

That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.

The guidebook chapter detailing the strategy, which was recently spotlighted by E&E News, describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity”. It was written by Thomas Gilman, a former Chrysler executive who during Trump’s presidency was chief financial officer for NOAA’S parent body, the Commerce Department.

Gilman writes that one of NOAA’S six main offices, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, should be “disbanded” because it issues “theoretical” science and is “the source of much of Noaa’s climate alarmism”. Though he admits it serves “important public safety and business functions as well as academic functions”, Gilman says data from the National Hurricane Center must be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”.

But NOAA’S research and data are “largely neutral right now”, said Andrew Rosenberg, a former NOAA official who is now a fellow at the University of New Hampshire. “It in fact basically reports the science as the scientific evidence accumulates and has been quite cautious about reporting climate effects,” he said. “It’s not pushing some agenda.”

The rhetoric harkens back to the Trump administration’s scrubbing of climate crisis-related webpages from government websites and stifling climate scientists, said Gloninger, who now works at an environmental consulting firm, the Woods Hole Group.

“It’s one of those things where it seems like if you stop talking about climate change, I think that they truly believe it will just go away,” he said. “They say this term ‘climate alarmism’ … and well, the existential crisis of our lifetime is alarming.”

NOAA also houses the National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather and climate forecasts and warnings. Gilman calls for the service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations”.

He goes on to say that Americans are already reliant on private weather forecasters, specifically naming AccuWeather and citing a PR release issued by the company to claim that “studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable” than the public sector’s. (The mention is noteworthy as Trump once tapped the former CEO of AccuWeather to lead NOAA, though his nomination was soon withdrawn.)

The claims come amid years of attempts from US conservatives to help private companies enter the forecasting arena – proposals that are “nonsense”, said Rosenberg.

Right now, all people can access high-quality forecasts for free through the NWS. But if forecasts were conducted only by private companies that have a profit motive, crucial programming might no longer be available to those in whom business executives don’t see value, said Rosenberg.

“What about air-quality forecasts in underserved communities? What about forecasts available to farmers that aren’t wealthy farmers? Storm-surge forecasts in communities that aren’t wealthy?” he said. “The frontlines of most of climate change are Black and brown communities that have less resources. Are they going to be getting the same service?”

Private companies like Google, thanks to technological advancements in artificial intelligence, may now indeed be producing more accurate forecasts, said Andrew Blum, author of the 2019 book The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast. Those private forecasts, however, are all built on NOAA’S data and resources.

Fully privatizing forecasting could also threaten the accuracy of forecasts, said Gloninger, who pointed to AccuWeather’s well-known 30- and 60-day forecasts as one example. Analysts have found that these forecasts are only right about half the time, since peer-reviewed research has found that there is an eight- to 10-day limit on the accuracy of forecasts.

“You can say it’s going to be 75 degrees out on May 15, but we’re not at that ability right now in meteorology,” said Gloninger. Privatizing forecasting could incentivize readings even further into the future to increase views and profits, he said.

Commercializing weather forecasts – an “amazing example of intergovernmental, American-led, postwar, technological achievement” – would also betray the very spirit of the endeavor, said Blum.

In the post-second world war era, John F. Kennedy called for a global weather-forecasting system that relied on unprecedented levels of scientific exchange. A privatized system could potentially stymie the exchange of weather data among countries, yielding less accurate results.

The founding of weather forecasting itself showcases the danger of giving profit-driven companies control, said Rosenberg. When British V. Adm Robert FitzRoy first introduced Britain to the concept of forecasts during Victorian times, he was often bitterly attacked by business interests. The reason: workers were unwilling to risk their lives when they knew dangerous weather was on the horizon.

“The ship owners said, well, that means maybe I lost a day’s income because the fishermen wouldn’t go out and risk their lives when there was a forecast that was really bad, so they didn’t want a forecast that would give them a day’s warning,” Rosenberg said. “The profit motive ended up trying to push people to do things that were dangerous … there’s a lesson there.”

[weatherdotgov]

I just learned there's an app that you can download called CrowdMag and it's a public science project! It's basically asking people to record the magnetic field using your phones built in magnetometer.

Here's a link on the NOAA website if you wanna check it out

They could really use the help filling in gaps in data!

[weathernerdmando]

if anyone wants to know why forcasts are off sometimes or why weather seems to be so hard to predict i highly recomend at least doing a basic dive into the way forcasts are made. the NWS has a great resource called jetstream that has so much of the various aspects of weather for people in an easier to read format (as in, its meant for the average person, not someone going to college format) and it’ll help you understand why things are harder than you’d think to predict.

in short, there’s a fuckton of variables, and they can change quickly. we can’t change the weather ourselves so we rely on past data and observations taken at certain times and conditions can change quickly.

and bonus, if you have some knowledge of things yourself, you can look at your local forecasts, the nws, etc and see if you think things might turn out slightly differently bc of where you are vs their station! and you’ll just have a better understanding of what they’re talking about anyways regardless!

(also reading the forecast discussions is HILARIOUS sometimes, the meteorologists can sound Judgemental of the weather on occasion and i love it.)

[tornadoquest]

Is Severe Weather In Your Forecast? #severeweather #tornado #flooding

For those folks in the southern and central plains and adjacent areas, it’s no secret that we’re heading into several days of severe weather with all hazards, including tornadoes, expected. Here’s some very important and helpful severe weather, tornado, lightning, and flood safety information from the National Weather Service. Also, remember to plan well ahead if you’re traveling, working, etc.…

[reavenedges-lies]

[renukoavali]

not so fun avali fact:

high risk of a severe weather outbreak across southeast Iowa, west-central Illinois, far northeastern missouri, parts of eastern arkansas, northern mississippi and southwestern tennessee. this includes chances for strong, long-longtracked (and possibly violent) tornadoes

source

source

[madlichen]

monday's weather forecast: hot today, transitioning to big-ass wall of holy shiiit this evening. wimdy tonight, then hot and clear skies tomorrow. wind will be blowing from the west, except where tornadoes. brace yourselves accordingly.

source: NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center

[environmentalwatch]

Ocean Temperatures Soar in Florida

Ocean temperatures are rising in Florida, threatening coral, contributing to humidity, and keeping the air from cooling at night. According to the World Meteorological Organization, almost every day last week unofficially broke records for high temperatures. Japan reported that the global average temperature on Friday was half a degree (F) warmer than its past record hottest day, which was in…

[joe-england]

Let's talk about a PSA, weather, Twitter, and a lack of PSAs....

[taxi-davis]