 |
| Sunday afternoon was supposed to be at least partly sunny in Vermont. But it wasn't. This is the sky over St. Albans, Vermont at around 4:30 p.m. Sunday. National Weather Service meteorologists remain excellent, but are their forecasts suffering from degraded data due to Trump NOAA cutbacks? I'm wondering. |
Thank you, Trump administration.
I don't have any empirical data to back up this suspicion At least not yet. But my radar is buzzing on this one.
Locally here in Vermont, there's been some forecast misses lately. Sunday was a classic example. After some morning clouds, it was supposed to clear up into a mostly sunny day, with temperatures up near 80.
It didn't happen. For the most part, it stayed cloudy all day. And the clouds kept temperatures lower than expected.
Saturday's forecast was kind of wonky too, with less rain than expected across central and parts of southern Vermont.
Forecast misses happen, they always have. The atmosphere is so complicated, you'd expect that some things are going on up there that we just don't get. We get surprises.
More importantly, I'm not at all disparaging the excellent meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in South Burlington. Or anywhere. They're serving the public as awesomely as they always did.
I have to wonder, though, if the Trump administration cutbacks at NOAa and the National Weather Service are starting to have effects.
Before Trump, as Mother Jones explains:
"......NOAA has built one of the most robust weather monitoring systems in the world, collecting 6.3 billion observations per day. The NWS then plugs the data from these instruments into computer models to predict the next torrential downpour, cold snap, heat wave or thunderstorm."
That was then, this is now.
NOAA still has a robust data collection system, but it's not as robust as it once was. Staffing is thin, thanks to pre-existing vacancies and especially the hundreds of layoffs under DOGE, that slash and burn of federal agencies that Elon Musk headed up earlier this year.
There's fewer weather balloon launches, which give critical information as to the nuances of what's going on in the atmosphere. Other programs are cut back as well.
These cutbacks leave us with garbage in, garbage out. If the quality of the data is not quite up to snuff, then there might be missing pieces of the weather picture, so the forecast could be off.
A huge share of the raw data meteorologists need in the United States comes from NOAA/National Weather Service. Your friendly TV meteorologist uses that data for her forecast. I'm not a meteorologist, but I know my way around the National Weather Service and can find information. That's what I use to try to give you a picture of what's going on.
My musings here are just a theory. So far. Like I mentioned, I have not yet seen any rigorous analyses of weather forecasts have degraded.
This past weekend might have been just the usual rough patch that happens from time to time.
It's also not as if all forecasts will be wildly wrong. Most will still be spot on. Even the ones that are off, like Sunday's clouds and Saturday's weird rainfall distribution in Vermont, were still partly on track.
For instance, the National Weather Service had told us in advance Sunday morning would be rather cloudy. It's just the clearing skies hit a few hours later than forecast. It got clear in the evening, not the afternoon.
The Saturday forecast was correct in that heavier rain went through Vermont and lighter amount fell south. It was just the light south amounts were by and large really light.
An expected sunny Sunday that turns rather cloudy is at worst just a minor bummer.
However, I worry that far more dangerous brewing weather will get missed. True, the National Weather Service does its best to go all hands on deck when things look threatening. But the lack of data, the shortage of meteorologists increase the chances that critical clues in a developing weather disaster could easily get overlooked.
Which would cost lives.
These fears about worse forecasts are nothing new. We talked about this as soon as the cutbacks started this past winter. . Now those cutbacks are here, and I believe we're starting to see the effects.
Maybe it already happened. It's been a very busy tornado year in the United States. A few tornadoes either went unwarned or warnings went out long after the twister touched down. This has always happened from time to time. Sometimes, tornadoes managed to "hide" from the best radar images and from the most experienced meteorologists.
Did unwarned tornadoes and severe storms happen more frequently this spring and early summer? have no idea, but it's worth looking into.
If it turns out that weather forecasts are indeed getting inaccurate, and if it leads to unnecessary deaths, the blood is on the hands of those in the Trump administration.
Not that any of them really care.
No comments:
Post a Comment