Osodecentx said:
Assassin said:
Osodecentx said:
Assassin said:
As to the cuts, it's very strange as the National Weather Service was so bad for so many years before the cuts. The NWS that we gave billions to. The most accurate weather service has been long-timed family-owned and ad-based Accuweather who has a proprietary system for predicting the weather. Strange how that works. They are a corp now.
NWS is responsible for the deaths of thousands
https://eller.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Econ-WP-23-02.pdf
For another pov, read The Coming Storm by Michael Lewis. If my memory is correct (it isn't always) Accuweather takes NWS data, repackages it, and charges a fee for the same information that NWS had. Congress forbade NWS to release that information to the public at large.
IOW, taxpayers paid for NWS information but NWS couldn't release it to the public; then Accuweather obtains the NWS forecasts and charges for it.
Anybody else read Coming Storm?
Actually Accuweather takes a ton of data from different sources and repackages it. That accumulation has led them to a much better prediction record than NWS. They tend to be more accurate than NWS.
I told you my memory isn't perfect and I don't think this is worth arguing about. I'll stand by my memory of Lewis' conclusions in The Coming Storm (an Audible Book Original).
NWS gathers the information, makes an interpretation of the data, Accuweather takes that data, releases it for a fee and makes a good living.
Here is the blurb from Audible on the book:
Tornadoes, cyclones, tsunamis…Weather can be deadlyespecially when it strikes without warning. Millions of Americans could soon find themselves at the mercy of violent weather if the public data behind lifesaving storm alerts gets privatized for personal gain. In his first Audible Original, New York Timesbest-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis delivers hard-hitting research on not-so-random weather dataand how Washington plans to release it. Most urgently, Lewis's narrative reveals the potential cost of putting a price tag on information that could save lives.
"Both the National Weather Service and AccuWeather warned of the threat of flash flooding hours before the worst of the storm's impacts. AccuWeather warned customers of 'imminent flash flooding' 30 minutes prior to the National Weather Service's Flash Flood Warning, which provided even more advance notice."
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/weather/2025/07/05/accuweather-sent-warnings-ahead-of-kerr-county-flooding-that-killed-at-least-27/
This is a very busy graphic, so it may take awhile for your eyes to adjust, but I wanted to address some of your questions regarding the devastating floods that struck western portions of central Texas. Specifically, I wanted to address the forecasting of this event.
Although I did not see any of the forecasts provided by the news media in that part of the state, I can tell you that after a lenghty review of the forecast data, from earlier in the week nearly all computer models FAILED to predict the torrential rains that fell between San Angelo and Kerrville on Wednesday and Thursday.
This was true for all but one model: the higher resolution Canadian Model (RDPS model). Though it did predict more rain than actually occurred, it was one of the only models to pinpoint the area between San Angelo and Kerrville that would be hit with the heaviest of the rains.
Most other models predicted the flooding rainfall amounts would be well to the NE of San Angelo. Even one of the highly sophisticated CAM models did not do well at all and predicted only relatively light amounts in this area!
BUT ... there were other CAM models that predicted over 19 inches of rain with this event, but they, too, thought the bull's-eye would be NE of San Angelo and extending into western protions of north Texas, well out of reach of the watershed of the Guadalupe River.
I believe this is a good example of what we talked about a couple of weeks ago. In order to consistently and accurately predict these type of events, I believe we need more weather observations, especially weather balloons. We simply do not have enough information about what is going on in the upper levels of the atmosphere to accurately predict these type of events well in advance.
Did you know there are only 7 weather balloon stations for the entire state of Texas? And there are NO launching sites in central Texas. So for the area between Fort Worth and Midland - both cities of which routinely launch weather balloons - there was NO BALLOON DATA. We used to have weather balloons in Stephenville and San Antonio, but those were closed years ago.
When I was a grad student WAY BACK in the day, I was wanting to do a PhD on the effect of high-resolution upper-air data on computer model forecasts. I wanted to deploy an experimental weather balloon network in roughly equally-spaced locations across the state of Texas consisting of around 100 launching sites. But that turned out to be prohibitively expensive and a logisitcal nightmare.
But to this day, I would be curious to know what the impact would be if we had a lot more data from the upper-levels of the atmosphere to input into our computer models.
For example, we would know more precisely where the the cap boundary is, the cap thickness, and most importantly, cap strength. But since there are less than a handful of weather balloon stations between us and the source of the cap (i.e., Mexico and New Mexico) , we have to make educated "guesses" of where the back edge of the cap might be and how strong it is across its entire domain. Thus, less than a handful of data points are used to identify and measure a critical atmospheric feature that is hundreds of thousands of square miles in size.
Would additional upper-air balloon launches have helped in providing more precise advanced warning for the catastrophe that struck parts of the Concho Valley and the Hill Country this week? I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that it costs about $200 every time a balloon is launched which comes to a little more than $10 million a year for the roughly 90 sites across the country.
But science is no exception to budget limitations. We do the best with what we are given, and we are indeed grateful for what we have!
