More on the Compounding Issues Facing the NWS and NOAA

You have often heard about the issues facing the NWS and NOAA from this blog. As frequent readers know, I am a political conservative. 

So, I wanted to bring you the perspective of a former NWS and NOAA employee who is a political liberal. You can read his entire piece here. For a period a few hours after Alan posted his piece, a number of NOAA web sites were down. 

Further, Alan Gerard writes about an NWS office with no way to communicate with the outside world during a severe thunderstorm event earlier this spring:

There are definitely increasing concerns about the reliability of the aging NEXRAD fleet, in this case the issues were not with the radar themselves, but apparently with communications lines. The office at Wilmington was without communication for several hours, forcing the NWS office in Cleveland to provide backup services for the incommunicado Wilmington. Cleveland issued several severe thunderstorm warnings for Wilmington like the one above and a number of follow-up statements between 744 and 942 pm ET. 

The office in Cleveland had to pick up the workload of the Wilmington office while they were dealing with even more widespread and significant severe weather in their own area of responsibility, including two confirmed tornadoes during the period they were providing backup for Wilmington. To be clear, NWS offices have plans to take over for a disabled office, and I have no reason to suspect that the situation was not handled effectively — but obviously a single office fully engaged with severe weather having to take on the workload on the fly of another office also dealing with severe weather is not an optimal situation.

NWS IT and comms infrastructure issues are certainly nothing new. Major vulnerabilities were exposed during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang has published numerous articles over the last number of years about these issues, including this one in 2021 outlining a near total collapse of the agency’s online systems...

The list of NWS and NOAA issues is longer than can be covered in a single blog article. However, Alan goes on to write:

a long time NWS management member told me privately today that communications from higher levels of the organization are at the worst point they have witnessed at any time in their 30 year NWS career, and I have heard similar perspectives from many others.

There are numerous rumors about a "reorganization" of the NWS to take plane on June 1. However, their reorganization web page is, itself, a disaster. 

As we discussed on many occasions, I see a National Disaster Review Board to assist the NWS and NOAA as a way out of this mess as the only solution. They desperately need people from the outside and with a fresh point of view.