It is now Day 3 of the NWS's communications issues which make the radar data (red) unavailable. No restoration time has been announced.    -- original post -- From Alan Gerard a few minutes ago: Comms issue continues to impact eastern Gulf Coast NWS offices Flash flooding to be a risk here today as well as in south Texas. Record heat continues in California. OCT 4 Starting off today with an update on the  communications outage impacting the eastern Gulf Coast NWS offices in Mobile and Tallahassee . Unfortunately, the outage persists this morning, more than 24 hours after it started. RadarScope shows that data from the five Gulf Coast region radars from Mobile to Moody AFB, GA (KVAX) remains unavailable. Alan is a recently retired meteorologist with the NWS/NOAA. It is in no way an exaggeration that the NWS is falling apart. Why there isn't more concern from Congress or the Trump administration is baffling. 

--- Scroll Down for an Update From CNN --- The National Weather Service, again, has serious communications issues. Local NWS offices are having to resort to messages like these: The NWS has had 13   30-minute delays on the Weather Wire (the pipeline for tornado, flash flood and other urgent warnings) this afternoon. *Update*  The delays reached 30 minutes at one point!   [8:49pm] [resume original text] The issues with this agency are overwhelming and, as far as I can tell, there is little urgency to fix them. Instead, they are talking about what they will do with AI in 2-5 years.  CNN's Andrew Freedman has more on the outage. {2:38pm Wednesday}

Yesterday, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives by Oklahoma's Rep. Ralph Lucas regarding amendments and additions to the 2017 weather bill that passed Congress. Per the above graphic, it was already passed out of committee. You can find the bill here .  The bill is extremely long and so "I went through it so you don't have to." 😏  Below, you will find brief summaries of the bill's features and my comments about each. Unfortunately, there is nothing about a National Disaster Review Board.  The usual people were writing that this bill would prevent the public from getting public forecasts and storm warnings. Of course, it does the opposite . The very first item is to emphasize the NWS's public safety mission with the emphasis on "public." Agree 100%. The NWS sometimes strays too far from its core mission and I was glad to see that emphasized.  With regard to the above, here are some specific items: There will be research money into ge...

Taken by the author in Olathe, looking northeast. When you see meteorologists and others criticizing the people of Kerr County, Texas for not immediately evacuating when the first flood warning was received at 1:14am on July 4, here is a perfect example of the NWS’s flood warning credibility problem via an "areal flood advisory" in Olathe, Kansas, this evening.    Above is a photo, taken from Olathe, of a thunderstorm cluster moving over Kansas City. As I was starting to crop the photo to post on the blog, I was flabbergasted to see a NWS “flood advisory” for Olathe come out.   Here is the primary problem: While it may rain,  it isn’t going to flood in Olathe by 10:30, the time the advisory expires. The sky is blue  (look at the top of the photo). Plus, it has been dry in this area recently.      Next, while the list of locations included includes Olathe, the polygon does not. Which are people supposed to trust? Olathe is noted. The blue dot was m...

As of 4:10pm MDT, a severe thunderstorm warning is out in Wyoming but the NWS is essentially guessing as both of Wyoming's radars are down and have been since mid-evening yesterday. Warnings are being issued out of the NWS at Billings, MT and Rapid City but they are all essentially flying blind without the radars. The Denver radar can give somewhat of a view in southeast Wyoming but that is about it.  If there were violent tornadoes or flash floods in the center of the state, the NWS would not be able to measure and warn of them.  This happens far too often and it periodically occurs during periods of floods, tornadoes, large hail, etc., as it is today.  As explained many times, the National Weather Service is a mess and was a mess long before President Trump was sworn in. The leadership of NOAA and the NWS seem to be unable to fix it. That is why outside advice and expertise is needed to fix this. 

National Weather Service office in Wichita From a National Weather Service (NWS) source this morning: "The offices in Wichita and Dodge City went down 'hard' since about 11:30pm last night. This is the third time in the past year. [ Note: There were severe thunderstorms near Dodge City last night.]  The NWS office in Goodland backed up Dodge City and Topeka backed up Wichita.  I've told you that failed communications systems with no backup  in each office has become an all-too-frequent problem. While each office has primary, secondary and tertiary backups, it has the potential to put a severe strain on the office providing backup, especially if they are short-staffed.  This has become a more frequent occurrence since the NWS stopped supporting the VSat satellite system each office had until last year. FYI: that was before the Trump Administration came into office." From a college meteorology professor yesterday evening who is upset with me because I believe maj...

Right now, the NWS and America's private-sector meteorologists are dealing with a major storm. Please scroll down for more info. But, I'm taking time out of my storm coverage because of this vital issue. Bill Nye (who else, 🙄) has come up with a theory that the cuts at NWS/NOAA are because Elon Musk is going to buy the National Weather Service.  Wish I was in Vegas so I could make a bet: it won't happen -- just like 500 "forecasters" were not laid off Friday in spite of what many news organizations would have you believe . Nevertheless, the layoffs were unfortunate and not well planned. Other cuts, discussed here , should not happen.  Let's get serious: The NWS is an essential federal service. Not to mention the thousands of lives it saves, scientific studies have shown that it returns $10 to the economy for every dollar of its budget (the American Meteorological Society explains, here ). It has virtually zero fat. NOAA, on the other hand, has quite a bi...

A Meteorologist Wrote This Afternoon "Something" -- My Least Favorite Term in Tropical Meteorology As I Wrote Two Days Ago Since that clump of clouds might turn into "something," what might it be? Tricycle? Restaurant? Painting? I really wish meteorologists would speak/write, "tropical storm" or "tropical depression" when they are talking about developing tropical weather and stop this silly dancing around.  As I wrote earlier this week, we don't worry about tropical weather system on this blog until they are seven days from reaching the United States. We don't try to create worry to get clicks. And, when there is a looming storm, we will clearly communicate about it. 

This evening was an unusual weather situation with three areas within the same weather system where tornadoes were produced. The middle area, in Kansas, was not covered by a tornado or severe thunderstorm watch. That is an official product of the National Weather Service, so I do not use the words "watch" or "warning" unless it comes from them.  So, how does a private-sector meteorologist let people know in advance that a storm may produce a tornado and that it is time to prepare? I don't know of a perfect way, but this is what I did earlier today. I added the orange outline to the area where the NWS was going to issue its tornado watch (red). Chase County, where the tornado occurred, is under the abbreviation, "Dam" for damaging winds. That was posted just before 3:30pm. At 6:05pm, it was becoming clear that a new thunderstorm was forming to the south of an existing line of thunderstorms. Meteorologists and storm chasers call these "tail-end char...

Condensation trails ("contrails") from jet engines are not some nefarious scheme to control the weather.  Contrails are just the exhaust from the combustion that occurs within the engine.  With the minor exception of cloud seeding in mountains, humans do not know how to control the weather. That is why the Governor of Utah requested prayers this weekend to end their drought . If something is in the provenance of God, petitioning Him makes a great deal of sense.  However, author Naomi Wolf got banned from Twitter a few days ago for "spreading  misinformation" -- a ban I do  not  support. Free speech is a bedrock American principle.  The cure for misinformation is more information. Had she not been banned, a meteorologist could have gently corrected her. Now, she will likely be upset and dig in her heels.  The same is true with Yale's announcement last week that it was going to disassociate with people spreading "misinformation" about climate. ...

Big Climate can continue to do focus groups if it wants but it looks like it will be futile. And, this doesn't even include last week's terrible week for wind energy. Here's a thought: level with people.  Accurately state the advantages and disadvantages of a warmer climate and let them come to their own conclusions.  Nah, they'll never do that. 

In the posting below (scroll down), I comment about the latest bad science from NOAA pertaining to global warming.  Propaganda is one thing. This is a truly  important issue : The cost of fixing the bandwidth problem is a trivial one-time expenditure of $1.5 million. Of course, disseminating data, forecasts and warnings for the public is the core mission of the National Weather Service. "Limiting key data" should be the last choice among the options available to it.  I worked with the National Weather Service, almost daily, for 47 years. They are the very best bargain in the federal government . But, the NWS has two increasingly serious challenges: The NWS's culture has always been one of, "we want to be all things to all people." As is usually inevitable in organizations with that mindset, they are failing. And, the increasingly serious problems multiply by the day (e.g., see this post about radars from November 21). We are going to be lucky if there isn't...