I don’t know why you posted in here but whatever my issues with the organization may be, Dana Brown is not one of them.
Back on topic, I have seen Ty’s hurricane command center and can confirm that he does have a plan.
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Oops.
Stay safe Ty.
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It’s my bar and a raincoat.
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Back when I was a young lad and had time, I’d have 3 computers and a couple of iPads arrayed on my kids homework desk to watch/monitor landfalling hurricanes and my wife would walk in an just mutter, “you’re such a geek”.
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She was speaking for all of us.
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I kid, of course. I’m very much the same. Growing up in Galveston, we had the magnetic hurricane tracking map with the little arrow magnets and we would anxiously wait for the newest coordinates so we could place another magnet and try to get an idea where the thing was going. I can’t hear NOAA weather radio anymore without flashbacks of my childhood.
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The bar and a “raincoat” was a common plan back in the day.
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Mentioning NOAA weather radio got me to thinking…I can still recite the station ID of the Galveston office.
“This is NOAA weather radio KHB Four Zero, broadcasting on a frequency of 162 point fahv fahv (it was Texas) megahertz, with antenna located atop the 21-story American National Insurance Company in downtown Galveston”
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And, putting this here just for fun: NWS GFS verification scores continue to increase, especially for tropical weather and especially for intensity (where it is the best in the world). This initial track/intensity forecast was from early Monday, when the storm was not even yet a coalesced depression. It will be interesting to check back once the storm is over to see how the forecast verified. They were literally predicting something significant to form out of thin air.
The work to iteratively change these models is impressive. The next version of the GFS will be a whopper. We are rushing to completion upgrades to HERA (my agency is doing this buildout for NWS) so that NWS has the high performance supercomputing horsepower to run the nextgen of numerical weather prediction models. What is not well detailed in that presentation is the addition of significant Generative AI components into the models. Numerical weather prediction tools have been using machine learning-base AI for years but this will be a game changer.
And, so you all can feel good about the investment you have made in all of this as taxpayers, we share everything. All of it is available to anyone, no strings attached. All of the data and all of the code. Very different than other “competing” tools like the Euro that act as if enhancing life-saving and beneficial weather prediction is some sort of competition.
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Don’t ask it to play a game.
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Thanks for this info; it’s very interesting. As a casual observer over my lifetime, I oddly embraced and enjoyed the uncertainty in this area of predictive science. That uncertainty is almost completely gone.
On a less important but related subject, I sense that they have made virtually no strides in long-term hurricane forecasts or seasonal forecasts. You know, the number of storms, major storms, number that will impact the mainland, etc. I’m not exactly sure who uses these forecasts (FEMA, insurance companies?) and don’t know how critical they are, but there’s a lot of room for improvement.
Alas, frequently lacked execution.
There has been around a 15% increase in seasonal forecast accuracy in the last 30 years. Which is (very) statistically significant.
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I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Das/David, not sure if you work for NWS or NOAA, but I can tell you how eternally grateful I am for y’all’s work considering at my job we work alongside/hand in hand with Mother Nature. She has slapped me upside the head and kicked my ass many times in my +20 yr airline flying career and the tools we now have in the flight deck for weather forecasting and viewing is light years ahead of when I started. The return on investment with our tax dollars for NOAA and NWS is superb.
Keep up the great work.
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Das could tell you who he works for…but then he’d have to kill you.
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I remember the NOAA agent in Aransas Pass back in my shrimpin’ days. She was always asking details about our catch and we would preserve any unusual critter we picked up for her to document. She was quite good at dealing with some salty, crusty shrimpers.
Damnit.
I knew there was a catch, HH/Matt.
The Pentaverate
Ha. I work for GSA now, supporting all Fed agencies with technology and the like. The first half of my career was at Lockheed Martin supporting the teams at NOAA, NASA, DoD, etc… with weather-related research.
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