Nation’s Top Extreme Weather Tracker Goes Down In Hurricane Helene
In one prescient Simpsons episode, Lisa yells for her dad to come inside as the air pressure outside plummets and gusts of wind send rocking Homer back and forth in his hammock. When Homer assures Lisa there’s no record of a hurricane ever hitting Springfield, she replies: “Yes, but the records only go back to 1978, when the Hall of Records was mysteriously blown away!”
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On Monday, severe flooding from Hurricane Helene shut down the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, the nation’s foremost tracker of extreme weather and climate data. The NCEI is headquartered in downtown Asheville near the River Arts District, which sustained some of the worst hurricane damage in the region. Many of the NCEI’s crucial weather-tracking systems – such as daily temperature and precipitation data for the country – are offline as NOAA staff deal with the damage wrought by one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history. As of Wednesday, the confirmed death toll from Helene in Asheville and surrounding Buncombe County was 61 people.
The ironic outage highlights how critical infrastructure in the United States may be at greater risk as severe weather events increase in frequency and intensity. Weather-caused disturbances are the leading cause of electricity outage in the U.S., and have increased at an average annual rate of 11.9% since 2013. While there have been some efforts to buttress U.S. infrastructure against the growing climate threat, recent events show there is a lot of work to do.
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