NOAA's public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV
45 comments
·February 11, 2025user3939382
I’d be ok with looking to streamline NOAA, double check budgets etc, but just disbanding it no.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
I need to trim my fingernails but I am not going to let a crazed axe murderer in my house to do so
GolfPopper
I'm extremely skeptical of the entire premise of DOGE. There are vast changes being made to very large organizations, in very short timespans, with the claim that those making them know what they're doing. But the timespans in question - days to weeks at most - mean that there's no time to review anything. So those making changes do not, cannot, be making decisions based on reviews of available evidence, because they haven't given themselves time to review the evidence. Which in turn means that when they claim they do, they're either delusional or lying.
Chesterton's Fence [1] would also seem to apply here, but I mostly think it's not even getting that far. DOGE isn't doing an audit (if it was, there would be auditors, not talented young programmers) and then taking action. DOGE is executing already planned actions, while pretending to be an audit, and helping itself to a great deal of access and data along the way.
pfd1986
The plan seems to be to (1) "RAGE: Retire All Government Employees (...), take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists"
So in essence, they think these short term problems can be reversed once the pawns are replaced.
(1) https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...
hypeatei
DOGE seems to be treating this like a culling in a private company but you can't do that. It's completely normal for private businesses to fail but we rely on the government as a safety net (e.g. social security, FDIC, etc..) so failure there is catastrophic.
2OEH8eoCRo0
Yep. NOAA is the source of all the weather data that all of your weather apps and TV stations use.
acomjean
I remember seeing "weather.gov" on one of the monitors of a local tv news station. (they had kind of an open newsroom).
Weather.gov is a antidote from the add sponsored mess that weather websites are. Of course I suspect most people use phone apps now. But they have a lot of information on those pages, including weather discussions.
I follow this because my startup had to normalize for weather so we needed weather information. We went to "weatherunderground" (a play on a 60s era group perhaps?) and paid some money to get that weather data. They got bought by weathercompany/IBM. I had a developer account and could pull hourly weather information (I had grand plans to compare predictions vs actual) that got axed
weather.gov was always there. They don't have an api, but I loved their weather graph which lets you look at a bunch of weather over the next couple days (and includes sunset and sunrise).
eg https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3774&lon=-7...
mmooss
Cui bono?
One benefit to some is the continued assault on sources of truth: Academics, everyone even arguably left-wing, news media, science, now we lack a source of truth on weather. More generally, the idea of an apoltical, non-profit source of truth is actively denied and any example is destroyed. The CIA and FBI are other examples.
Without a source of truth, how can any public agreement or action form? All information becomes social media. Notice who controls that too: Meta, X, and also Bytedance will be beholden to the same people destroying all else.
throw0101d
> Cui bono?
Barry Myers of AccuWeather for one: they charge for their services. See "The Plan to Privatize Weather Forecasts":
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archiv...
* https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/...
John Oliver did a story about this in 2019 (Trump 1.0):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers#Nomination_to_...
If NOAA discontinues free weather forecasts, everyone (news, websites, apps) will have to pay someone to get them.
beowulfey
Honestly, I will never pay for a weather service. If I have to keep an umbrella in my bag, so be it. If it means an unexpected snow day, oh well.
Other services that depend upon weather will pass those fees down to me anyway, no reason to pay for it twice.
jmclnx
Which is why NOAA needs to be left alone. But Trump and maybe the GOP wants to privatize NOAA, which would be a disaster for the US.
lotsofpulp
Already tried once 7 years ago:
pridkett
Rick Santorum tried doing this repeatedly starting in 2005. It was one of personal crusades in the Senate.
https://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/7-year-old-attack-on-...
WarOnPrivacy
We don't seem to have any lesson-learning folks in play.
jmclnx
>In 2018, an investigation by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found rampant, pervasive and severe sexual harassment at AccuWeather
Depends upon the lesson, when it comes to harassment, the GOP learned and found ways to get the public to accept this.
Seems the only reason it failed was it seems Myers was found to be a sexual predator. These days, that seems to be a requirement to be the head of an agency.
jauntywundrkind
The lesson seems to be that those who can keep attacking democracy again and again and again will eventually some day succeed in tearing things down.
hnburnsy
>But Trump and maybe the GOP wants to privatize NOAA, which would be a disaster for the US.
Where is this accusation? All I've seen in calls for commercialization of NOAA's data in the un-avowed Project 2025...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...
>Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
TehCorwiz
That would basically mean the government funding the satellites, computers, storage, etc. Which is basically where almost all expenditures are. So it would effectively socialize the cost but privatize the results. In essence we would have to pay twice for the data, once to the government in taxes for the equipment, then again to some private company because....why again?
hnburnsy
If you have Pay TV, you are already paying twice for the data when it is delivered via your local news station, national news station, or The Weather Channel. Would be nice if NOAA would make some money providing its data to commercial operations.
buerkle
Read right from the source, https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FUL...
A good chunk is based on their complete climate change denial and their wish to privatize much of the US government.
Not sure what you mean by "un-avowed" Project 2025, a number of the authors are in prominent positions within the Trump administration.
hnburnsy
This feels like a strawman, I haven't seen any proposal to eliminate or privatize NOAA. Just checking it looks like the un-avowed Project 2025 suggested commercializing the data which seems smart to me. Why let all these billion dollar weather channels, media companies, and apps ride on NOAA's free data? Non-commercial use of the data could still remain free.
drivingmenuts
Well, there this:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91274927/trump-wants-to-dismantl...
I'm sure Elon will provide AI-generated weather reports. Someday. Might be from Mars, but we won't have to deal with the smallest uniformed service.
hnburnsy
Fast Company, quoting Project 2025, really.
Anyhoo, PBS said of the un-avowed Project 2025...
>Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
ryoshu
Why should a government agency "fully commercialize its forecasting operations"?
blueanon
Generally pro-dodge but NOAA is worth saving. They do some great data collection. They have a cool infrastructure globally: https://gml.noaa.gov/
hirsin
Is this something like inverse gell-man amnesia? You're aware of the value noaa provides so you're skeptical about removing it, but when we turn the page to talk about another agency removal makes sense again?
Not attempting to dunk, I should say, but wondering how this gets modeled and if there's actually a discrepancy there
rurp
Right, I think we're going to find that a test of "Does this sound like a waste to an uninformed person who has thought about it for five seconds" is a pretty poor framework for making sweeping changes.
paddw
Not a fan overall of what DOGE is doing, but I disagree with your line of reasoning here. Obviously not all government agencies provide comparable amounts of value to the general public based on the resources they consume. Does one have to be an expert on the inner workings and initiatives of each of these organizations to have an opinion? Maybe, but that doesn't seem practical, outside of having some large oversight body employing many people to review this... which is just what DOGE purportedly is.
Now, is the current DOGE proceeding to do this in a reasonable way? No. But that largely comes down your assessment of the people running it, not anything implicit
hirsin
We have an existing oversight body, the OIG, which is a couple orders of magnitude larger than DOGE. And a reasonable statement you could defensibly make is that OIG isn't doing enough to curtail spending, the same way you or I aren't doing enough to prevent bugs in the code.
The only thing DOGE does, that OIG doesn't, is _not_ attempt to understand the value of the work being done.
The people in DOGE are of course a problem, but the process they're following is flawed from the get go, namely "judge programs based on the opinion of some uninformed outsiders".
vizzier
> Obviously not all government agencies provide comparable amounts of value to the general public based on the resources they consume.
This doesn't seem obvious to me.
lazycog512
Appeal to emotion.
NOAA does do some good stuff but a lot of it is infrastructure that has existed since before I was born with some wires stuck into it to send it over a network.
It's Google and other private companies that took their weather data and properly made an AI around it.
As with all of these agencies, I think it's important to caution against complete slash and burn, but I am also curious to see the receipts. Post the data and let me decide for myself.
Falling back to appeals of emotion in essays just makes the non-true believers stay suspicious.
thadt
> Post the data and let me decide for myself
NOAA has been posting the data, literally for years now [1], with forecast updates in near real-time[2]. Replacing their data products would be a non-trivial endeavor.
Consider a scenario where someone needed to predict the dispersion of an airborne chemical after an accident, in real time, to coordinate evacuation routes. That is going to require rather precise and up to date modeled weather data - the kind that anyone can go get from NOAA right now. Sometimes the benefits of a system aren't apparent until we need it.
[1] https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/grib/hpcgrib.shtml
[2] https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/data/rea...
mmooss
They present a lot of factual information. Why do you call it appeal to emotion?
Also, on what do you base your claims NOAA's activities? The article is by "Atmospheric scientists Christine Wiedinmyer and Kari Bowen, who is a former National Weather Service forecaster".
> Post the data and let me decide for myself.
For everything NOAA does and every agency? Who would have the expertise to even begin to evaluate it, much less the time.
hirsin
It's funny. We get up in arms because our boss's boss's boss wants to decide if the work we're doing this sprint is valuable - there's no way they can begin to understand what it is they pay me to do here! They've got dozens or hundreds of reports, no way they can decide if fixing this CSS bug is the best use of my time.
And then people think they can decide if the radar station detecting low altitude systems near Palau is a good investment or not.
mmooss
'Do your own research!'
A bad boss limits everyone's abilities to what the boss understands and can do. This governing approach limits world-class scientists to what the public understands - which is essentially the tactical argument made by the GOP: It looks useless to you and me and that is our source of truth! Are you condescending elites calling us dumb?
The Dems are complicit because in about 25 years, they haven't bothered to come up with a simple, effective counterargument.
I don't know anything about weather data. I couldn't imagine overseeing these scientists or their technology.
drawkward
>Post the data and let me decide for myself
Lets be honest here: you're not going to do that, because, as others have pointed out, the data is already posted...and you obviously have decided against the NOAA, without even looking at the data (because you didn't even know it was available).
But let's be charitable here: maybe you will "do your own research" aka decide for yourself. How would you go about that? Its a giant dataset, or more accurately, a giant set of datasets--probably way too much for one dude to handle...the NOAA is certainly more than one person big!
In fact, I'm sure you dont even have a relevant degree--after all, if you were a meteorologist, you would know what the NOAA is and does and certainly the fact that they post their data.
So: you wont look at the data. You arent even qualified to consider the data!
But lets be charitable again and assume you were trained in a field relevant to meteorological data. What would you compare the data to? How would you check it? You are taming the canonical source of data and want to "check it" against...what exactly?
See, this is the thing that is galling about the entire DOGE project and MAGA in general:
It is a bunch of people who are tearing things down because they dont like them. Not because MAGA can provide proof and "look into it." Nay, its just a bunch of underqualified people who are tired of made to feel dumb, because Western culture has moved beyond their small worldviews.
NOAA is fantastic, I was alpine climbing in the very bottom of south america near El Chalten and NOAA is pretty much the only place to get a reliable forecast down there. Fantastic service.