Last Tuesday, a fierce severe thunderstorm complex formed in southeast Indiana and raced eastnortheast across Ohio and into western and central Pennsylvania. You might have heard about it on our weather-obsessed media, although in our time of climate change one weather disaster quickly melds into the next one, so understandable if you do not know what I am referring to.
We were without power for about 48 hours (people in hurricane areas are “pfft try no power for over a week” about this, but it’s still not fun). Others in our region just got it back yesterday evening, and in the Pittsburgh area, as of this writing, there are still almost 20,000 people left without power. More than 400,000 Pennsylvania power customers were without power at its peak, and the storms killed four people in the Keystone State.
A standard media line after these storms, one that thankfully I am seeing less of, is “these storms came out of nowhere.” But, in this case, not true. The threat was well-forecasted, both by the National Weather Service’s State College, PA office (Facebook post the night before the event) and the NWS’s Pittsburgh office (Facebook post the night before the event). There was a severe thunderstorm watch prior to the storms that was issued hours before they happened, and warnings were issued out ahead of the storms for people to take cover as they moved across the state.
This is all possible because of what Elon Musk and his crew believe is a waste of resources – the National Weather Service and its parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The reasoning behind the cuts ranges from it being “woke” because they produce data that proves climate change is real, to the ridiculous thinking of “we get our weather from our apps we don’t need it.”
For the latter, the weather apps on your phone that do not come from a reputable organization like AccuWeather or Weather.com are pretty much poor and unreliable. They also drive meteorologists batty. They are also pulling data from NOAA, even if they are not doing a great job of interpreting it.
NOAA, you see, operates satellites and computer models at a scale that no corporation can really match and still give weather information for free to the public. This includes warnings.
The severe weather season is bad enough without the people who are working to warn us of incoming storms feeling overworked and under attack due to massive layoffs. Looming on the horizon is hurricane season, and this specter has former NWS directors so alarmed they co-signed a letter warning of the possibility of increased deaths. Seems you need to have experts staffing our federal offices to help warn of and prevent disasters. Who knew!
Meteorologists never get the respect they deserve because of this national obsession with hating on people who do great jobs in the service of a completely wrong perception of their work (see also teachers, etc) but it seems like a lot of people really do appreciate their work. Often you don’t appreciate something until it’s not there, so hopefully at least some of the people who cling desperately to the delusion that weather forecasts are never right will see exactly what it’s like when those so-called “must be nice to have a job where you get paid to be wrong all the time” people aren’t there to warn us the next time Ma Nature throws us an upper cut. Which given climate change will continue to happen more and more, even if the GOP wants to hide the data.
The last word goes to Etta James.