| great read, I would apologize for the political nature of this blog, but hey... when Congress doesn't fund NOAA projects... it's political ! We Owe Europe A Lot Of Money For Letting Us See Their Weather Model snippet: The blame lies squarely with the Congress. In a few weeks, a new supercomputer will go online at NOAA, and next year we'll get a new GOES weather satellite. They both will be nearly as good as what Japan and Europe have had for sometime, and you can thank Hurricane Sandy for that. That new supercomputer is a direct result of the embarrassment over the poor performance of U.S. models during Sandy. Almost every TV meteorologist has picked up the phone and heard something along the lines of "Why don't you use "our" models to forecast with? (Some just start by calling us commies-no, really!) and my reply is always the same: "Do you want the correct forecast or a wrong one". Based on my own experience, about one out of ten prefer the more patriotically correct, but wrong one. The severe federal budget cuts have hurt NOAA's ability to make forecasts and provide warnings, and an event like this proves just how much money and lives those warnings save. Europe has funded their weather enterprises well, while here in America, our funding for science has led to a situation similar to our second world roads and airports. We are starting to catch up, but Europe is not standing still, and has major upgrades planned for their weather model, along with an even better weather satellite. We'll improve, but frankly I see no real signs of catching up. NOAA needs more people, and better funding, for research and remote sensing. BADLY. |