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At the time of this writing, the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Center reports Eye of category 5 Dorian moving little while over Grand Bahama island. That page also contains several other views and forecasts of the storm.
Though it no longer looks like Florida will get a "direct hit", the storm's currently-predicted run up the US Atlantic coast promises storm surges, very heavy rain with potential flooding, and of course high winds.
For those who lie in the path of this beast, please accept my personal best wishes for you and your loved ones making it through safely.
What sites have you found to be the most informative, timely, and useful? Special credit for those which are minimally sensationalistic. Any webcams to recommend? How are things in your area? What preparations are you making?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03 2019, @01:47AM
For spaghetti plots, I recommend http://hurricanes.ral.ucar.edu/realtime/current/ [ucar.edu]. The one you won't get on that site is the ECMWF or the ECMWF ensemble.
As for IBM, they're partially responsible. NBC sold off the Weather Channel's forecasting and online operations to IBM, then sold off the TV channel to another company. NBC is partly to blame. One of the loudest voices for more privatization of the weather enterprise is Accuweather, so I assign some blame to them as well. While they're not in the US, ECMWF shouldn't get a free pass, either.
NOAA gives away a tremendous amount of data, including the entire archive of WSR-88D radar data, a large amount of model data (partially archived), satellite data from many of the most advanced weather satellites in the world, and a lot of other observations. These data are free and should remain free. There's a lot of free and open source software available, such as almost the entirety of the code that runs the WSR-88D radars [weather.gov]. Lots of other countries benefit from the satellite and GFS (global model) data that the US gives away to everyone.
The problem is that all too often, the NWS union opposes any cuts or reorganization [nwseo.org] of the NWS. Some in the media then portray any proposed cuts as eliminating essential services [forbes.com]. This is harmful. Back in the 1990s, lots of NWS offices were closed. This also coincided with a massive modernization effort to improve radars, satellites, computer models, and vastly upgrade the technology available to forecasters. Since then, the NWS seems to be stuck in the 1990s. I've been told (personal communication) that the NWS union even opposes automating some tasks currently performed to human forecasters, even if all of those forecasters will be assigned to other duties, and no jobs are lost at all.
One of those links portrays VORTEX-SE as an essential research program. That's incredibly misleading. Many scientists viewed VORTEX-SE as a bad idea from the beginning and a stopgap project until funding would come along for research campaigns that were more likely to yield productive research. Other projects like VORTEX (94-95) and VORTEX2 (09-10) had two years of field work and a third year of funding to analyze the data. In many respects, VORTEX-SE is more like VORTEX-99, which had an even more limited budget to field operations. Unlike these prior campaigns, VORTEX-SE has run for several years, and has yielded very limited useful research. It's been very difficult to collect good data sets in the Southeast because of topography. That's why the >a href="https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=319916">current request for VORTEX-SE research proposals indicates there won't be another field campaign in the Southeast at all. VORTEX-SE hasn't been particularly successful and is hardly an essential program.
In fairness, supercomputing resources, upper air observations, and mesonets are essential to computer models and producing good forecasts. Cutting funding for observations would reduce the skill of computer models, resulting in worse forecasts. Cutting NWS forecasters might not be a great idea, but it depends on the details of how its done. If it corresponds with an upgrade to the technology and automating some tasks currently performed by humans, it might be worth modernizing the NWS again. Indiscriminate cuts to forecaster jobs would be a really bad idea, however.
The problem is that the NWS union and many others in the weather community portray every dime of NWS funding to be completely essential. It is not. Cutting VORTEX-SE, for example, would be a good move. Allocate the funding to technology transfer and modernizing the NWS. When the NWS portrays every aspect of its operations as completely untouchable, it makes it easy for the private sector to portray the NWS as bloated and argue for budget cuts. The NWS union also opposes evaluating the forecasts made by individual forecasters and perhaps replacing the lowest performing forecasters.
The NWS and the union need to compromise, otherwise Congress might actually succeed in making substantial cuts to weather forecasting. I don't trust them to get it right.