The American Weather Forecast Is in Trouble
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Unfortunately this is all it is. The death cult wants to turn a profit while they burn our planet.
* https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/21/climate/trump-blocks-scientis...
Accuweather and basically every forecaster is using input data from NOAA or other government agencies.
The biggest private companies could, theoretically, run proprietary models for their customers if NOAA were to quit doing forecasts altogether. For instance, the GFS is open source so someone with a big enough supercomputer could use it.
Plus, surface readings are only a small part of the atmospheric picture; you need weather balloons to generate a more holistic reflection of the atmosphere at a site. There are also data generated from aircraft, but those are more one-dimensional (in the sense that they are only sampling conditions at a single altitude) than twice-daily balloon launches from selected sites. Until someone decides to implement a private, nation-wide radiosonde network, there probably won’t be a numerical prediction model that operates independently of NOAA data.
How do you finance decentralised infrastructure, if you do not have a center with a power monopole to collect taxesd.
John Oliver had a show on this during Trump 1.0:
If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
NOAA provides the basis for basically all weather prediction in the western hemisphere. Some companies are a lil better than others because they add onto NOAA and tweak their specific algos, but yeah ultimately weather prediction is only possible to the accuracy it is because of NOAA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schoolhouse_Blizzard
> The Schoolhouse Blizzard ... hit the U.S. Great Plains on January 12, 1888. With an estimated 235 deaths, it is the world's 10th deadliest winter storm on record.
> The blizzard came unexpectedly on a relatively warm day, and many people were caught unaware, including children in one-room schoolhouses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane
> The 1900 Galveston hurricane .. is the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. ... it left between 6,000 and 12,000 fatalities in the United States ...
> The Weather Bureau forecasters had no way of knowing the storm's trajectory, as Weather Bureau director Willis Luther Moore implemented a policy to block telegraph reports from Cuban meteorologists at the meteorological observatory of the Colegio de Belén in Havana – considered one of the most advanced meteorological institutions in the world at the time – due to tensions in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War. Moore also changed protocol to force local Weather Bureau offices to seek authorization from the central office before issuing storm warnings.
It also saves a lot of money. If a storm is coming, when do you need to divert incoming flights because the weather will be too bad? How much staff do you need to clear the roads for the upcoming snowstorm? Does the likely storm damage justify harvesting early? How much of the coast should be under a hurricane warning?