As someone who knows nothing about the NWS, would they have gotten it right or at least closer if they didn’t have funding cuts? Also to be clear, I don’t support cutting their funding, just wondering if this was unavoidable.
This is a matter of storms being able to supercharge themselves due to global warming. Don’t let people reframe this against the NWS. It is like Hurricane Erick the other week that jumped to category 3 out of nowhere, storms are being rapidly supercharged. This flood broke all sorts of records, so to phrase it as the previous commenter did is unfair… In the near future, their ability to even predict as well as they did will degrade though, at which point you will hear more of ‘they never knew what they were talking about anyways.’ This lays the groundwork for that.
People aren’t reframing it directly against the NWS, they’re blaming the fascist regime for cutting funds to important services. NWS has already stated the cuts are effecting the amount of data they can collect which directly effects the accuracy of their models, making the NWS less effective.
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t work there but I studied meteorology and I’m a volunteer for a forecast office. They take in so many data sources that serve as input into forecast models and humans. The qualify of the data has dropped, but which data exactly could have made a difference would be difficult or impossible to pinpoint. It’s possible better quality data would have helped, but we don’t know for sure.
For flooding it is a typical estimation from modelling from things like topography maps and known precipitation events. It is all rough estimations without collecting monitoring data, which is what funding for these agencies tend to be used for.
It requires a lot of information to accurately model and predict if any given river valley can handle 1.75 inches in a 3 mile radius in 4 hours, versus 3.25 inches in a 1 mile radius in 2 hours. How much does a 0.2 inch rainfall event in the previous 24 hours impact? What about 1 inch in the same area in 24 hours? (And so on.)
As someone who knows nothing about the NWS, would they have gotten it right or at least closer if they didn’t have funding cuts? Also to be clear, I don’t support cutting their funding, just wondering if this was unavoidable.
This is a matter of storms being able to supercharge themselves due to global warming. Don’t let people reframe this against the NWS. It is like Hurricane Erick the other week that jumped to category 3 out of nowhere, storms are being rapidly supercharged. This flood broke all sorts of records, so to phrase it as the previous commenter did is unfair… In the near future, their ability to even predict as well as they did will degrade though, at which point you will hear more of ‘they never knew what they were talking about anyways.’ This lays the groundwork for that.
People aren’t reframing it directly against the NWS, they’re blaming the fascist regime for cutting funds to important services. NWS has already stated the cuts are effecting the amount of data they can collect which directly effects the accuracy of their models, making the NWS less effective.
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t work there but I studied meteorology and I’m a volunteer for a forecast office. They take in so many data sources that serve as input into forecast models and humans. The qualify of the data has dropped, but which data exactly could have made a difference would be difficult or impossible to pinpoint. It’s possible better quality data would have helped, but we don’t know for sure.
Not sure if you can answer this. But do you have any idea how these forecasts normally work? Like how do they normally predict flooding
For flooding it is a typical estimation from modelling from things like topography maps and known precipitation events. It is all rough estimations without collecting monitoring data, which is what funding for these agencies tend to be used for.
It requires a lot of information to accurately model and predict if any given river valley can handle 1.75 inches in a 3 mile radius in 4 hours, versus 3.25 inches in a 1 mile radius in 2 hours. How much does a 0.2 inch rainfall event in the previous 24 hours impact? What about 1 inch in the same area in 24 hours? (And so on.)