As a 35-year national NWS forecaster and researcher in severe and tropical meteorology, I support the bipartisan National Weather Safety Board (NWSB) Act, which would provide an NTSB-like board review of weather disasters. Numerous other meteorologists and I have suggested something akin to this for many years.
While I agree with fellow retired NWS scientist Alan Gerard in his “Substack” column that it doesn’t do enough to evaluate non-weather disasters nor NWS performance, we shouldn’t let the perfect get in the way of the good. The NWSB Act would be a positive step toward learning from weather disasters in a systematic, consistent and accountable way, not the overpoliticized, self-interested, wagon-circling shams that the “NWS Service Assessments” often became.
Improving NWS verification services may need separate legislative action anyway, especially to address one of the most blatant, yet little-discussed, conflicts of interest that exist in all of federal government, and has for decades: verification of weather warnings by the very same offices that issue them (often, even the same forecasters).
This includes rampant use of estimated — as opposed to measured — wind and hail reports, with over 90% of thunderstorm-wind “verification” being estimates and, based on human wind-tunnel experiments, overestimates. [For much more on this, read a formally peer-reviewed, scientific publication that I lead-authored.] It’s a fox-guarding-henhouse verification system rife with opportunities for padding and inflation, regardless of how much actually happens (which is practically unknowable).
As someone who loves the NWS as a 35-year public servant there, and sees it as an extremely valuable service for the taxpayer (at a bit over a penny a person a day), its very integrity and scientific credibility depend on eliminating conflicts of interest, and ensuring optimal service through independent evaluation of both disaster services and warning performance.
One likely finding I already predict, with great confidence, will be that NWS technology and delivery each need vast improvement. Due in part to longstanding short-staffing and failure to encourage and enable true innovation, both NWS’ front-facing forecast suite (including web/app presence) and internal capabilities have become vastly outdated.
To wit, we should have been using four-dimensional, XYZ-plane-rotatable displays of model and radar fields by the time I retired, on touchscreens. That tech has been in the media at least 25 years, gaming industry since the late 1990s, Hollywood even earlier. Three-dimensional storm simulations have been around in research since 1978, on then-massive computers with less capacity than high-end gaming desktops and cloud computing of today, and finescale simulations of tornadoes and their parent supercells with Hollywood-quality graphic output were run a decade ago, on data far denser than modern operational weather models.
Instead, the most advanced severe-weather forecast operation in the world (SPC) still was — and remains — stuck with 30-year-old 2D display systems and having to mouse-click individual points on outlook lines (instead of using a stylus or finger to save time). The only 3D rotatable displays in the NWS are in licensed private-sector radar software (GR2 Analyst)!
We already should have had nationally deployed, phased-array, dual-polarization radar by 2011 when in reality, the old, greasy mechanical dishes (increasingly failure prone) were retrofitted with dual-pol. Both phased array and dual-pol tech, BTW, were in military and lab use before I was born. One is still not in our radars.
As for forecast presentation, technical discussions for other meteorologists still have their place, and should. Yet I agree with those who say we (NWS, of which I am a proud retiree) could do a much better job conveying threats in meaningful, animated, easy to understand ways. Yes, that should include robust app development and aggressive use of modern web capabilities—not handcuffing ourselves to the slowest common denominator of 486 processors and Netscape because somebody, somewhere, might still be using a teletype emulator. Hell, it wasn’t until just a decade ago that we quit using ALL CAPS in everything, like it was still 1967.
It’s baffling that we still have to issue watches with expiration times, instead of rolling them along open-ended with the threats, as we discussed among us (“amoeba watches”) for 20+ years. That predates the oft-tested, never implemented concept of “Threats in Motion” for warnings, which is very similar, and which also is long past technological capability for operationalizing. Funding (or lack thereof) has played a role, but in my experience, bureaucratic intransigence and a CYA culture frightened of innovation was at least as responsible.
Independent review would highlight shortcomings — both technological and situational — not to assign blame, but to spotlight areas for improvement. NWS, and the entire weather enterprise, should welcome true accontability!
