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Say Nothing About the Failing Satellite
The QuikScat satellite used for predicting the intensity and path of hurricanes could fail at any time (it's already past its designed lifetime). Without this satellite, the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% — and there are no plans for any replacement. Bill Proenza, director of the National Hurricane Center, has been outspokenly critical of his superiors on this situation, but he has been warned to stop commenting on it.
Wouldn't a satellite named "QuickScat" be properly used for improvising jazz lyrics?
... and then they built the supercollider.
Says he can do it soon. Didn't leave his number :(
Like many important things, this has taken a back seat to the needs of the Military Machine to support Iraq and well as their own technology projects for spying on Americans and the rest of the world.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The current crowd in power really does seem to believe they can create their own reality. As Ron Suskind reported,
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'''
But, as Ronald Reagan said—quoting John Adams, consciously or unconsciously, without attribution—"facts are stubborn things."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This is all part of a ploy by the global warming alarmists to show how "crazy" hurricanes are behaving and how meteorologists can no longer predict their path with the accuracy they could in the past. To ensure another Katrina doesn't happy, the Imperial Federal Government will establish behavior guidelines to make sure the citizens are acting in a way that is friendly to our environment.
Shortly after that, Freedom and Liberty are brought out back and shot.
</tin foil hat off>
Boy it's a lovely day outside.
appears to be the motivation here. I don't know exactly what the radical right thinks they're going to do about the actual hurricanes, but I guess it's about what the radical right thought they were going to do about the actual Iraqis.
Can someone who knows about hurricane prediction please answer a quick question for me? I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Where were the media's predictions coming from? Did the hurricane forcasters in the scientific community screw up (i.e. were the scientists really predicting a large hurricane season)? Or did the media just present a one-sided view when really many hurricane forcasters were not predicting anything unusual?
Because if the hurricane forcasting is so off as to generate such predictions as we were heard about 2006, then a decrease in accuracy of 16% probably isn't that serious, is it (they're so far off anyways)?
I'm writing as a layman here.
"You're doing a heckuva job, Griffy!"
Just before the next hurricane wipes out Miami, probably.
Rob
"Dear Mr. Proenza,
How dare you point out the fact that the Emperor has no clothes!
Now, instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on PR, we're going to have to actually keep our mission-critical technology going?
You sir, do NOT know how to properly game the system, and if that isn't bad enough, you're trying to stop us from doing it too?
You shall be punished.
Signed,
Your Boss."
The Digital Sorceress
Cause really, what are the chances that a hurricane would destroy a major metropolitan area? Oh wait...
the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16%
16% more crappy forecasts... great.
Recently our simple, midwest 3 day weather forecast has changed drastically four time... going from mostly rain and storms to 92F with full sun.
I'm not sure if global warming(tm) is to blame for less accurate weather models - but it's my opinion the weatherman's predictions are getting worse no matter how many satellites you give them.
It's great to know that there's at least a few people with a sense of integrity and responsibility walking the halls of government agencies. People like Bill Proenza.
He'll be fired within a year.
The full John Adams quote (from "Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials"):
The Founding Fathers wisdom FTW!
I don't see any attribution for that "senior adviser to Bush" quoted by Ron Suskind. How do I know that quote isn't whole cloth made up by Suskind in an effort to create his own reality?
Scatterometer:
"A radar scatterometer is designed to determine the normalized radar cross section (sigma-0) of the surface. Scatterometers operate by transmitting a pulse of microwave energy towards the Earth's surface and measuring the reflected energy. A separate measurement of the noise-only power is made and subtracted from the signal+noise measurement to determine the backscatter signal power. Sigma-0 is computed from the signal power measurement using the distributed target radar equation.
"The primary application of spaceborne scatterometry has been measurements near-surface winds over the ocean. By combining sigma-0 measurements from different azimuth angles, the near-surface wind vector over the ocean's surface can be determined using a geophysical model function (GMF) which relates wind and backscatter. Scatterometer wind measurements are partiularly useful for monitoring hurricanes. Scatterometer data is being applied to the study of tropical vegetation, soil moisture, polar ice, and global change."
Or maybe that's "pounding your ...."
I never cease to be amazed at people's ability to not only politicize every possible event, but for what should be reasonably objective people to read a headline and then start screeching about the evils of the powers that be.
As a simple example, the summary [taken directly from the article without actually checking other sources] makes this sound worse than it is.
Here's a bit more detail: "If the satellite falters, experts estimate that the accuracy of two-day forecasts could suffer by 10 per cent and three-day forecasts by 16 per cent. That could translate into large tracts of coastline and the difference between a city being evacuated or not.". Even this adds in a nice piece of conjecture. So, let's assume that 2 days out, the model is showing a probability path that's 100 miles wide. That translates to it now being 110 miles wide. What if the path was 300 miles wide? That's 330 miles. At 3 days, we're looking at 116 miles and 348 miles respectively.
To address where the percentages come from, you'll have to rely on my 3rd hand recollection from a newscast I saw on the subject earlier in the week. They took the models that they ran in the past with the satellite data and reran them without the data. No information was given on how accurate the models themselves are.
The info quoted above came from an AP story. A copy of which is here: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/06/13/tech -hurricane.html
Sometimes you have to choose between being right and having a job.
Table-ized A.I.
there was an unexpectedly intense El Nino, which disrupted the 2006 season.
its not there this year, so there is nothing to stop the 2007 being as bad as predicted.
The forecast for the 2006 hurricane season called for a lot of storms. They got that long-range forecast wrong. The forecast was over-hyped in the press, no doubt because of Katrina. Sometimes they get it wrong. Mostly they don't.
It just may be experiencing a temporary deorbiting maneuver.
Table-ized A.I.
This is an interesting contrast to the previous Slashdot story, in which scientists views on global warming was compared to totalitarian ideology. Now we see (again) politicians behaving in the same manner.
AFAICT, that this satellite helps to predict the behavior and path of an individual active hurricane, which would be useful for deciding where and when to post warnings and evacuation orders. That task would have almost nothing in common with forecasting the statistical nature of an overall hurricane season.
The National Hurricane Center predicted a more than typical number of storms for that year indicating that we were going to have a very active season. They base this on average water surface temperatures, atmospheric pressure trends and much much more. The problem is that even with all of this information it is possible that something that they didn't take into account will affect the hurricane season and consequently make their yearly prediction wrong. Predicting the intensity of a hurricane season is not a particularly simple thing to do, and just like any weather prediction it has a high possibility of being incorrect. Like the other reply said, the media simply grabbed onto this prediction and basically struck fear into the people living here, but I suppose that alarming the people and forcing them to prepare for something that might happen is better than predicting an under active hurricane season and being surprised.
The predictions that the media reports do come from scientists -- generally either from the National Hurricane Center or Dr. William Gray at Colorado State University. An unexpected El Nino developed last year that caused the spring forecasts to be wrong. see http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2634.htm
and http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2006/s2748.htm
So what's to fear? Last year the weather service predicted, what, a half-dozen major hurricanes to hit the East Coast of America? And there were zero. A 16% loss in accuracy would mean what, exactly? How could it get worse than that ? Looks to me that when you have zero % accuracy, a 16% drop in accuracy might actually be an improvement.
A few things here:
Firstly, I believe that when it is referring to hurricane forecasts, it is actually referring to hurricane tracking, not predicting the number of hurricanes in the upcoming season. A 16% decrease in the accuracy of hurricane forecasting therefore would result in meteorologists being less sure of the path that a hurricane would take. It's possible it's also referring to the prediction of a storm system being elevated to 'hurricane' status after forming a tropical storm/depression.
Even assuming I am completely wrong (that wouldn't be surprising) and the satellite will be use to help predict hurricane seasons, hopefully the replacement satellite will offer forecasters some new information to help in the future (Not every year's predictions are as off as the 2006 predictions, but if they were, I'd agree with you, a accurcy decreasing by 16% really won't make much of a difference.)
Secondly, while the 2006 hurricane season was grossly overstated and scientists really were predicting a record number of hurricanes, you can blame the media for creating a frenzy regarding the results. In any other year, the prediction might have gotten a mention on page 20 of a newspaper, or the science section of CNN.com, but after hurricane Katrina, media outlets jumped at the opportunity for more scaremongering. So I'd say, both are to blame.
One of the important things to realize is that he's not saying the acgency is necessarily underfunded, but that it has the money to easily replace the satellite but it is being used for PR instead.
It looks like they're predicting a record number of storms this year too..
Lots more about QuickScat here:
http://manati.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/quikscat/
I would agree that the data from the satellite is used to predict the path of individual hurricanes. The season prediction probably wouldn't include real time wind speed data.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The predictions were based on the computer models. In hindsight, they went back and analyzed the atmospheric data and found that there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, being carried by the prevailing winds. The dust was coming from the sahara. It appears that the dust had the affect of reducing storm intensity. That's the kind of thing that's hard to account for in a model. Especially when it the variables can change significantly from year to year.
I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
I don't know a hell of a lot about hurricane prediction, but I did hear one expert say that el-nino had a moderating influence on the 2006 hurricane season, and el-nino is wearing off for 2007.
As far as the media is concerned, I wouldn't trust them a lick to report anything regarding science. Global warming has an effect on the long term outlook for hurricanes, not one single year. Looking at and single data point like "it's hotter in place X in year Y" is inaccurate and misleading. Global warming means average temperature across the globe over long periods of time. In this case that means that the 2006 hurricane season being an inactive one means very little.
AccountKiller
The problem identified by the NOAA whistleblower isn't limited to this one weather satellite. The US Government procures lots of satellites for lots of different purposes, some mundane, and some esoteric. What they have in common is: they are very expensive, have very long lead times, and they must be very, very reliable. The satellites are built by government contractors to government specs, in other words, the finished product can only be as good as the specs. How well or how poorly the government manages this process, at this point in time, is left as an exercise for the reader.
No, it's part of the new policy on global warming: if you can't detect it, it isn't there.
And so funding was cut on climate monitoring satelites. Even though we need more monitoring on ocean temperatures and the like to refine computer models. I imagine this was just caught up in it, since ocean temperatures are sorta coorelated with strong hurricanes...
No science is good science!
Are they even this accurate now?
No, The Press is not responsible for bad predictions on the part of NOAA. It's not The Press that made the predictions, only reported them. And what if the predictions had been correct and The Press had not reported them? The fault for bad predictions lies with those who made them.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In my going for sarcasm in the last sentence, I didn't mean to imply that ocean temperatures are only slightly correlated with hurricanes. They are: warmer water gives you stronger hurricanes, because that's how they build up their energy.
Now here's the interesting part: the warmer waters given to us by climate change so far haven't actually been also giving us stronger storms. Instead they've been giving us more frequent storms. And so hurricane season actually started several weeks early this year, whereas when I was a kid, I remember them announcing the start of hurricane season, but then you didn't actually have any storms out there until August. And now you get them in May!
And yet that was the seventeenth storm that we know of that happened before the start of hurricane season. The current hurricane cycle is the same cycle we've been observing since we've started recording these things. The effect of ocean warming, if there is an effect, on hurricane intensity/frequency is currently not great enough to be measured.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Will it hit the Whitehouse? I can see the headline now... President Bush killed by flying Scat, Al Qaeda run National Weather Service stormed by FBI... Tubgirl also in custody...
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
I just love these statistics they quote. "Forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% percent". Not 15%, not 17%... no... 16%. Reminds me of the core breach countdowns on ST:TNG. Every time there was going to be a catastrophic failure of some component, the computer would of course know to the exact second when the failure would occur and calmly count it down for you.
Now if we could only get Majel Barret to do some voiceover for this event:
"Sattelite failure iminent - 16% degredation of forecast capabilities will occur in seventeen days."
(tinfoil hat on)
Prediction is bad because it prevents FEMA from taking over.
Many important laws are suspended when FEMA is in charge.
(tinfoil hat off)
The Science Friday radio show had a hurricane center prediction rep on the show, and he basically owned up to it. He did say that 15 out of 16 of the annual predictions turned out to underpredict the hurricanes. It turned out that they missed the El Nino, which has the effect of chopping off the upper part of the hurricane storm, weakening them and reducing their likelihood of formation.
I don't watch the news channels but every time a weather scientist, geologist, biologist or glaciologist is on Science Friday, they are quick to say that it's hard to discern exactly how much of an effect that global warming had on a specific situation vs. normal cyclical weather.
The predictions were based on the computer models. In hindsight, they went back and analyzed the atmospheric data and found that there was a lot of dust in the atmosphere, being carried by the prevailing winds. The dust was coming from the sahara. It appears that the dust had the affect of reducing storm intensity. That's the kind of thing that's hard to account for in a model. Especially when it the variables can change significantly from year to year.
Wait... others here say it was El Nino that kept the hurricanes away. Which is it then? Both? If so, why have I never seen anyone mention both in the same explanation?If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Tasmin Archer would have plenty to say about it...
Summation 2
I work at NOAA, in the satellite group National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/
1 2105.html Why did NPOESS cost overruns happen? "Hey, lets do a contract on some incredibly experimental sensors involving high risk research and make sure they are on a fixed budget". Not smart.
. cfm I'm not clear whether it was initially launched as NASA only and handed off to us, or if they "owned" the satellite while we did the ground systems for it.
The US government regularly under-funds satellites & space systems. You can see this with the huge cost overruns on NPOESS http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive05/NPOESS_1
I am off on a tangent though - Quickscat is a different story. Quickscat was a NASA R&D bird . See http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/quikscat/index
NASA does R&D type of satellites - proof of concepts, risk reduction, etc. We in NESDIS-NOAA often take over running them, or we run their sensors on our satellites. Well, these proof of concept satellites were never intended to be part of a series providing a continual new functionality.
NESDIS/NOAA has two major satellite series that will always (in the future) have spares for:
GOES series http://osd.goes.noaa.gov/
POES series http://www.oso.noaa.gov/poes/ (although the newest will be NPOESS via a joint program with DoD replacing our POES and DoD's DMSP)
There is another satellite that is likely to fall soon too - Windsat/Coriolis http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Projects/windsat.html While Windsat is technically a Navy satellite, we run that one too, and it has no replacement either. Fortunately, Windsat is more about Navy stuff than it is about Hurricane tracking...
Bill Proenza, as a consumer of NESDIS' satellite data, sees NOAA efforts on the publicity side as being detrimental to the funding of the NOAA-NWS-National Hurricane center funding. Well, for the sake of accuracy, a few million dollars isn't going to fix our funding shortfalls...
Until Congress starts funding new satellite development properly (not like NPOESS) this problem won't go away.
There's no point in putting up a replacement for the failing satellite...after all, the Rapture will be here soon enough, and whoever's left deserves to be surprised by the weather.
</snark>
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
QuikSCAT is for profiling a storm, which does improve the forecast. Every mile of coastline that has to be evacuated costs us around $1,000,000 (maybe more these days), and a 16% decrease in track forecast accuracy has a real monetary impact.
Predicting the number of storms in a season is tricky business. Last year El Nino fired up, which created a situation that suppressed hurricanes. Otherwise the conditions were very good for hurricane development. That hasn't really changed, so this year could see many storms since the El Nino has weakened. But it is possible it will just be an average year.
NOAA's and NASA's earth observing satellite fleets are aging, and replacements are either not in the queue or 8+ years away. Our radar satellites like QuikSCAT and microwave-sensing satellites, both of which are critical for tropical weather monitoring, are past their useful lifetimes with no replacements on deck. This is a problem. One could argue that the problem is funding, and to some degree it is, but another part of the problem is management and a lack of useful oversight by Congress. We are going to lose some of our weather and climate monitoring abilities because we launched a number of research satellites that we came to rely on and then did not make any plans to replace them.
As a native Floridian who still resides in FL, let me assure all /.ers, 16% worst prediction of the job they are currently doing won't mean squat. Their prediction of hurricane tracks has been horrid at best within any timeline of meaning preparedness time period. One has to take exhausting prep if it's coming for you, but you only have to do minor prep if it's passing within hundred miles. Had their predictions been on the nose, more or less, I would be horrified that they let a satelite go beyond it's expected life without having backups already in orbit. Having suffered getting my cage rattled or lead to believe it wouldn't hit here 12 hours before the Eyewall actually does hit, I'm not impressed with forecasting predictions. Therefore, 16% is meaningless to those of us who are sitting in the bulleye zone.
Why not wait for the satellite to fail, and then begin work on replacing it with the latest available technology? And who designes a satellite with a 6 year life span? We can do better than that.
The Admin and the Engineer
You're stupid.
Interesting how our government is worried about scientific satellites going well past their "designed lifetime,..." Isn't there another project that went (and is still going) well past it's designed lifetime. Maybe they ought to let the Mars Rover team design the next hurricane satellite?
There must not have been a contractor willing to line pockets thick enough to get this job done.
Seriously, this administration is letting everything essential rot on the vine while they push war, war, war.
BushCo just does not understand that when the decision is made to "go", it will be years before another satellite can be put in place. They are compromising safety, lives, and disaster response.
It's sad. Very sad.
So what you're saying essentially is that hurricane predictions are already bad so letting them get worse is no big deal? Improved technology would likely replace the existing satellite which would mean better predictions instead of even worse predictions which you seem content with for some strange reason. You would expect the opposite to be true.
Time makes more converts than reason
After seeing the Discovery report on the way the Pentagon was treated this kind of news really doesn't surprise me at all. For those of you unknown to this information: the news that the Pentagon was in a miserable state at some point and in fact breaking every state law there was with regards to safety and maintenance. Cellars flooding, water pipes eroding, etc, etc. To me the US sometimes looks like the Zentradi to me. The war hungry alien race (Robotech saga) which can do a lot exept manage to actually repair their own stuff.
Look at the shuttle.. Its an obsolete design but almost 20 years (if not more) after date its still the same flying bucket of bolts. Not even the heatshield has been replaced with something else. Please spare me the whine about NASA not getting any budget. If they'd been talking to European or Japanese companies they could have gotten the belly of the shuttle coated with a solution which would have done the same job as the tiles without falling off for the same price they'd now take for using the tile structure.
All in all; its just the US way. Once you got some working plan you stick with it for the next years to come and stop focussing on how you might be able to improve things. This is just another example... I mean; anyone could have foreseen the sattelite from going somewhere...
Now the real problem is ... you can't really address the problem by shooting at something. So that makes it a downright un-American issue.
Now here's what to do about it.
First of all the NOAA has to be brought under the Department of Home Security because that's where the money is nowadays. Secondly, submit a {sizeable} donation to to e.g. the Cato institute or an equivalent, and have them bring together a posse of "intelligence experts", who go on record as being "worried" that hurricanes may be caused by Al-Quaeda, or that Al-Quaeda is somehow taking advantage of them. PR campaigns in the media are optional, but be sure to work the lobby circuit.
Then introduce the number of tracked hurricanes as a DOH success metric. That's important because it's a measurable and *achievable* goal.
Now you've created a win-win situation! The DOH gets a clearly visible and achievable success metric [they haven't got all that many of those], and the NOAA gets the funding to track hurricanes in every part of the globe. Problem solved.
Which of course means delaying action by many decades on ESSENTIAL critical infrastructure items:
1. 50 years of discussion of the insolvency of Social Security from an actuarial point were and are valid.
2. 50 years of illegal migrants after the bracero program in California, and it & border security is still not solved
3. 35 years of oil supply crisis issues, and still there is not a single interim or long term program from congress
4. 20 years of pulling down the military in various ways has to be looked at from the perspective of the bad guys who change and hide and subvert and move from country to country: The U.S. must remain vigilant and up to date in peace time.
5. The constitution basically said the Federal Government should protect borders, commerce and currency and leave other issue to the states, and Congress is arguably not doing so good on a lot of these accounts (Mexico, foreign spying, China for a start resp.).
looks like /. has really devolved here if the parent gets modded to insightful...
the good news is that this gives me lots of hope for roping in more victims as a grifter!
What Reagan actually said was: "Facts are stupid things." Some have explained this by saying that Reagan was trying to quote Adams and misspoke.
Me and others have used QuikScat data many, many times over the years. It's been one of the most invaluable satellites for earth science research, both meteorology and oceanography. Knowing the surface winds is probably the best knowledge you can have about the oceans below. Losing this satellite would be a shame and a major blow to future work.
That satellite works now, it will always work. The satellite stopped working, it was not used. We are at war with Eastasia, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Welcome to 1984, try the freedom fags by the door.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Those aren't any kind of a threat. Come back when some terrorists have an impractical plot...
"is currently not great enough to be measured with the data set we have to measure it against"
The problem with an observational science like geology, astronomy or meteorology is that you have to take what nature gives you. You can't set up a controlled experiment that (fully) tests the real world conditions. When an event occurs you have to take all the measurements you possibly can. Then you sit back go to your (super)computer and your models and try and figure out what happened. Two different groups can approach the same situation from different angles, and can both independently come to different, reasonable, conclusions. In an experimental science like chemistry or particle physics, you'd perform another experiment controlling something thats different in the two models, look at this one's results, and then see how the two hypotheses hold up. You can't do this in an observational science. If we ever get exactly the same situation again, excepting either the dust in the atmosphere or el nino then you could make possibly come to some more concrete conclusions.
In short: this is how science works. Multiple hypotheses for the same event simply mean that we don't have a full understanding of what happened. You need more data, which in an experimental science means more experiments. In an observational science that means sitting back and hoping that mother nature will give you something that will validate/invalidate your hypothesis.
Yeah, I figured this guy was going to force me to pull up cites, so here we go:
http://www.gfdl.gov/~tk/glob_warm_hurr.html
A quick first search turned this one up, and it seems to list all the papers along with dissents.
If you look at section #4, those are the papers I'm thinking of. Dissenters seem to say that our instrumentation isn't accurate(*) and that the data set isn't long enough. Too bad we won't actually put up more and better instrumentation.
(*) There's six hurricane basins to look at. Some satelites only cover a small area, some may be old and not very sensitive. Etc.
It is my opinion, lots of people have played fast and loose, blaming a multitude of things on global warming. GW has become as much a political statement as a scientific one... in fact, it's probably more political right now. If it were pure science you'd have heard more about the positive points of the global warming scenario - whatever they are.
The best info I have seen shows higher sea surface temperatures (SST) in most global warming scenarios would only add minimally to hurricane strength. Not everyone agrees. Proponents, like Kerry Emanuel from MIT, say higher SSTs will make a big difference. It is his voice you probably heard two seasons ago. Chris Landsea of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA and Dr. William Gray of Colorado State disagree.
Truth is, hurricane formation is a lot more than just SST. Last year there was an unusually high amount of wind shear, which inhibits formation. And, the number of storms doesn't necessarily equate with the amount of tumult. Hurricane Andrew, the "A" storm, came in mid-August of a pretty slow hurricane season - but it devastated South Florida.
I remember listening to Dr. Bob Sheets of the Hurricane Center lecture about twenty years ago. Even then he was predicting an increase in storm frequency, based on a multi-decadal cycle that is observed, but not understood.
The parent post was right about one thing. There isn't a particularly large amount of skill in these seasonal forecasts. As I remember, last year's seasonal forecast from the Hurricane Center was off by a factor of two, or so.
In addition, I have read predictions every year since 2001 sometime in the late spring, that this years hurricane season would have an unusually large number of storms and hurricanes. Of those years, only in the year 2005 was it true. The only year I saw the press mention the previous years prediction was in 2006.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
-NASA
Have gnu, will travel.
Yes, it is not great enough to be measured with the 400 years of hurricane history we have to look at. That's the point, these recent hurricane seasons are not out of the acceptable range of what we've seen before.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
"Without this satellite, the accuracy of US forecasters' predictions could be degraded by up to 16% -- and there are no plans for any replacement." Just imagine how bad the weather forcasters will look when they are right a mere 0% of the time. This is not good!
This is exactly what happened. In fact as soon as they realized this predictions changed. It's amazing how many people don't know that.
Time makes more converts than reason
Yep. Don't ask a global warming alarmist though, they'll tell you all the science is settled and the models can't be wrong.
What the fuck are you talking about? As an avid watcher of hurricanes, not just those that hit Florida (have for ten years or so), NHC tracks are EXCELLENT within about 3 days. Now, if you go beyond that, then yes, expect track errors. Perhaps you are confusing the media with the NHC? The media tends to hype landfalls at specific locations for longer than they should.
Correct; to see this, take a look at the current sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly map, which shows the departure from normal temperatures (I think it's the average of 10 or so years from satellite data):g ht.6.14.2007.gif
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomni
Notice the cool (blue anomaly) waters off of the coast of Peru. The water was warmer than normal last year (El Nino) and has now switched to a weak La Nina, which is supposedly favorable for Atlantic hurricane formation. However, currently there is a lot of shear in the Atlantic so not much has developed thus far.
Source/more information (and to see older maps from late last season) is available here:
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo.html
On the other hand, WindSat gives a LOT more detail so this looks like the future direction for wind speed and direction. It seems to me part of the difficulty is combining a cost control culture at NASA procurment with a mission specs driven culture at Air Force procurment. This has led to slowing of the deployment of joint civilian-military meteorological assets. What you need is a lead agency for procurment which is also on the hook for cost overruns. If other agencies hitch a ride, that is a cost reduction for the government, but if contractors are told two different stories then things bog down. NASA can decide to fly something that will work but not as well as designed, like the IRS on Spitzer which has filter delamination after system integration. It would have cost too much to fix it. The Air Force can't because the data integrates into other systems that have to work or they are not worth anything. This is a basic problem that I see with NPOESS.s -selling-solar.html
--
Solar power without performance worries: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Well, he/she does live in a state that sees regular natural disasters. So reason...
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
> I heard countless predictions on the media that global warming was going to cause the 2006 hurricane season >to be catastrophically intense and large. Obviously it wasn't.
Obvious? The intensity of hurricanes or their number is nearly irrelevant to popular perception.
We pay LOTS of attention to those storm days that impact a vulnerable populated area
and none at all to those storm days that wash over the oceans.
Serious students of weather aren't given to pointing a year or two in advance to a particular
trouble spot and getting that kind of 'prediction' right. Heck, the flooding in New Orleans
was known to be a possibility going back about 30 years (the Corps of Engineers was
on record as asking for funds to update the flood controls for that long, and Congress
always said no).
In short, there's nothing obvious to us newspaper-reading citizens that would really
impress a weather scientist. The REAL weather data is what scientists feed on.
While I would like to have predictions as accurate as possible, I think reality may trump accurate predictions, especially in high population areas.
After going thru the nightmare of evacuating the Houston metro area for hurricane Rita, a lot of people around here say they are never going to evacuate again. More accuracy isn't going to change their minds. Keep in mind these people, at the time, thought they were running from a cat 5 storm.
The local bureaucracy has come up with a new evacuation plan since then. I suppose it will be better than nothing, which is pretty much what we had for Rita. However, I predict that there will be little change in people's behavior here, or in other parts of the country.
The hard core hurricane party people and the curmudgeons will stay. The faint of heart will leave early. The average Joe will leave when told by the bureaucracy. The fools will wait until its to late and decide to stand out in the wind and rain taking video with their cell phone.
The following statements have me a little puzzled:'Imminent demise' from what? Out of cooling fluids for sensors? Out of fuel for stabilizers? Last gyro outputting flakey data? Imminent implies to me that there is a know issue, but oddly no such issue is mentioned.
Three things stand out here: the word 'could', the word 'some' and the phrase 'up to'. 'Could diminish' is not the same as will diminish. 'Some hurricane forecasts' implies that not all forecasts use the data this satellite produces or that this satellite can't be used for all conditions. Finally, the last time I checked a change of 'up to' can mean no change at all.
I wonder where all these wishy washy, CYA, words come from: 'the experts' or the author of this story. If they are from 'the experts' It would make me wonder about what's really going on here. If they come from the author, then it's just another example of a reporter writing about something he really doesn't have a clue about.
FrankOur public institutions, like the Hurricane Control Center, act in the public interest, and
the claim of the reprimand "taking valuable time away from your public role" indicates,
in my view, that Mary Glackin, who presumably wrote or approved the document, is
corrupted and can no longer function as a useful civil servant. We, the people, need to
find a better person to take over that position. Clearly, warning of failure to maintain the
information gathering apparatus that supports hurricane warning is VERY MUCH the
correct public role for Bill Proenza. Kudos, Bill! Shame, Mary!
Alas, our current administration does not support the Hurricane Control Center as
well as it supports the likes of Mary Glackin.
So... I'm not a mathematician... but isn't 16% of 0, 0?
Bush government is just doing their job in stopping the scientists from getting any data from global warming. Hence, no satellites that tell of hurricanes. Perception management has been the Bush government doctrine since day one and stopping the scientists from reporting bad news about the climate is just part of protecting America.
Wish I had some mod points to rid you of the "Flamebait" moniker, because that moderation is blatantly unfair considering the fact that you have some good points - in particular that there might be some far better way to improve hurricane prediction than to launch more satellites. Perhaps better study of the dynamics of hurricanes or even ground based observation radar would be more cost effect and accurate.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Have you actually compared the records of the years 'you were a kid' with your memories? Or are simply supposed to make a judgement based on your imperfect and anecodotal evidence? I have done so - and found that not only did I miss multiple storms as a child, I also seem to have created a storm or two in my memories as a young adult!
"In recent interviews with The Miami Herald and other media, Proenza has strongly criticized leaders of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for spending millions of dollars on a public-relations campaign while hurricane forecasters deal with budget shortfalls."
I understand that Bush-bashing rates +1, cool! rating on Slashdot, let's back up a little.
While I realize it's easier just to assume there is a "darkly-hooded cabal of evil men"(tm) running our government, let's - for a moment - suppose that they are men and women just like you or me, basically rational, basically GOOD people trying to do the best that they can.
Rewind to Katrina: there were PLENTY of warnings, there was an extraordinarily good degree of accuracy in the predictions, and what happened? People blew it off. The human tragedy - no matter what you have to say about Ray Nagin, the city of New Orleans, the governor, etc - was that PEOPLE didn't get out of the hurricane's way *despite* being warned. And what is that? PUBLIC RELATIONS. Clearly, the agency believes, it has a credibility problem (I'd say it's a human-stupidity problem, but that's just me). So THAT'S their priority.
In a land of shortening budgets (and, for the Constitutionally-impaired out there, it's CONGRESS that sets budgets, not the President) everyone has preferences - this guy wants the new satellite, I'm sure other administrators want more staff, others want more ground observation, and all have very good reasons. BUT NOT EVERYONE CAN GET WHAT THEY WANT. And while I very much abhor much of the Republicans' spending priorities in the last 8 years, I don't see the Democrats RACING to correct them, aside from earmarks for their own districts, ie. business as usual.
So this guy, probably with the best of motives, decides he's not got enough traction internally, and takes his story to the sympathetic press who are slavering for any story that shows the "evil cabal at the top is clearly incompetent".
Yeah, I'd reprimand him too.
OK, just go back to your anti-Bush circle jerk, it's probably more fun than thinking.
-Styopa
Yes, it is that bad and even 16% worse prediction isn't going to matter. If they can get it right with a new satellite that will make a real world difference (ie they can actually predict where the beasties are headed to) and it'll take longer, that's fine by me. What the article does not go into detail, does the new sat make a significant increases over the current one? If it's only marginally, I'm even less impressed.
Dammy
"What the fuck are you talking about? As an avid watcher of hurricanes, not just those that hit Florida (have for ten years or so), NHC tracks are EXCELLENT within about 3 days. Now, if you go beyond that, then yes, expect track errors. Perhaps you are confusing the media with the NHC? The media tends to hype landfalls at specific locations for longer than they should."
If you think they have had an excellent tracking record three days out of it's actual landfall, there is nothing more I can say to you.
Dammy
You know what to do slashdotters...help unmuzzle this guy and email his boss: mary.glackin@noaa.gov
"Wish I had some mod points to rid you of the "Flamebait" moniker, because that moderation is blatantly unfair considering the fact that you have some good points - in particular that there might be some far better way to improve hurricane prediction than to launch more satellites. Perhaps better study of the dynamics of hurricanes or even ground based observation radar would be more cost effect and accurate."
Guess they can't take it that I'm a 45 year old native of Florida and live through enough hurricane tracks predictions to understand what is going on. And they don't.
Dammy
Call a conference (at a resort/casino) to voice concerns about global warming!
Invite the pretty people and let them talk to "Entertainment Tonight." No one else has to do anything!
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
The NHC average track errors for 3-days out is now around 150 miles, which is about the distance from southern Miami to West Palm Beach. For three days out, that's nothing short of excellent. Remember, the eye is not the whole storm. There's often a huge band of windy storms within a radius of 25-100 miles of the eye that just as damaging. If the NHC says the storm will hit Miami three days out and it hits 50 miles north, that's pretty damn good. I'm sorry.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=site%3Areal climate.org%20hurricane&meta=
Glad to help.
Well, since the prediction had nothing to do with global warming, I'm not sure who to blaim for this false concept.
Fort Meade has something to do with this. Someone will have to prove otherwise.
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
Um, did you see the url I posted later on? I admit my memories are not scientific data, which is why we have the NOAA. :>
The original forcasts was by hurricane forcasters, they said we are now in a period of increased numbers. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Atlantic has kicked up an average of 7.8 hurricanes and 3.8 major hurricanes per year since 1995, compared with an annual average of just five hurricanes and 1.5 major hurricanes over the preceding 25 years. But most scientists agree that the increased frequency is caused by a natural cycle, not global warming. Also the number of hurricanes in other parts of the world is decreasing so the global number is staying around the same.
That we are in a cyclical pattern was widly talked about until Katrina at which point the global warmists start talking about how global warming was causing the increase, then you had Al Gores film which pushed that global warming was the cause of the major hurricanes.
One thing when looking into this is to check what definition they are using for major hurricanes. So places use the force and length to determine you will also find sites that determine it based on the financial damage caused by the storm. Personally I think the finantial definition is a joke because more people are living on the coasts tehn before so the damage caused by theses storms will increase.
There was a hurricane forecaster on NPR's Science Friday a few weeks back and he talked about this at length.
Devon