The Hurricanes America Won’t See Coming

Part of NOAA will be shut down. The tragedy and threat to Americans’ lives is that many cuts are in parts of the budget used for research and forecasts. Gathering information for advancing weather forecasting will largely disappear.

PBS said, “Meteorologists and climate scientists are raising alarms about major cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, saying they will harm the country’s ability to forecast and respond to major weather events and put lives at risk.” People may see the next hurricane but won’t know as well as in the past if it is coming directly toward them.

Dangerous Layoffs

As research dollars erode, forecasting the next storm will suffer, as will the ability to improve forecasting tools. The entire National Weather Service will lose ground.

There is no bright future for the humans involved in advancing the content science of weather.

The only bright spot in the news of government funding cuts has nothing to do with humans. Recently, the door has been opened, showing that AI may do a better job than any current system and those likely to evolve from it.

AI has made advances in weather forecasting, meaning humans will barely be needed. Huge tech companies partially fund two.

Google has what is known as Graphcast. According to the search company, “GraphCast predicts weather conditions up to 10 days in advance more accurately and much faster than the industry gold-standard weather simulation system—the High Resolution Forecast (HRES), produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).” This is a wild statement.

AI Solution

AI chip leader Nvidia recently announced its Earth-2 service.” NVIDIA Earth-2 combines the power of AI, GPU acceleration, physical simulations, and computer graphics to develop applications that can simulate and visualize weather and climate predictions at a global scale with unprecedented accuracy and speed.” It will provide “real world” information.

It is too bad that NOAA will lose so many people. It may not matter.