Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Degrading Our Ability To Forecast The Weather

It's hard to overemphasize how destructive these balloon-launch cancellations are for our ability to model the weather and make weather forecasts. Without good data, models work on the principle of garbage in-garbage out. What's worse, of course is that these canceled launches are concentrated in the upper Midwest, which will wreck forecasts for the Mississippi Valley and the East Coast. Where a lot of tornadoes happen. 

Apparently the idea is to wreck the forecasts of the National Weather Service, so Americans will turn to private weathercasters. Those private businesses rely on the same balloon launches, however, so everyone will be in the same dark pit of ignorance, at least until the balloon launches are restored, by whatever means. 

Maybe anecdotes can help. In the late summer, I do some hurricane-path forecasts for friends who live in Tampa, FL. One thing that struck me about forecasting for the Caribbean Sea and the western Atlantic is how flat the tropical pressure gradient can be. With very little guidance from the immediate environment, hurricanes can respond instead to very distant events. Hurricane paths can be affected by the presence of thunderstorms in Venezuela, or by how rapidly storms pass from the Canadian Rockies onto the Great Plains. With enforced ignorance in the upper Midwest - here there be dragons! - it becomes harder to forecast hurricane paths in places like Florida.

Stupid, stupid DOGE!
The U.S. just experienced a deadly storm outbreak with over 100 tornadoes and 1000 hail reports. Weather balloons were a big tool for the NWS in these storms but...
The following National Weather Service locations will launch only 1 weather balloon per day — rather than 2. ❌❌ 
This limits how much data is being fed into weather models, and may slightly decrease accuracy over the northern U.S.

Note that I disgree that there will be a slight decrease in accuracy. It's going to be bigger than that.

No comments:

Post a Comment