The NWS is Falling Further Behind....

500 millibar forecast from the European Model

...how many times have we discussed that the National Weather Service (NWS) has major issues and is falling ever farther behind the state-of-the-art? By now, it must be in the dozens. More and more, others are realizing the ever-growing problems. 

For the third time in seven days, the Washington Post has published a balanced and informative article about how the National Weather Service is rapidly falling behind in the field of AI and weather forecasting. To quote the article:

The European Center’s fast start in AI “speaks to the differences in how the U.S. and Europeans organize their meteorological science and service strategy,” said Scott Weaver, who previously served as the White House executive director of meteorology. “European weather services are more streamlined and agile, so can potentially take advantage of rapid advances in science and move them into operations more quickly.” 

Experts point to NOAA’s more complex mission — to understand and predict the environment from deep sea to outer space — as one reason the agency has historically lagged behind the European Center. NOAA’s mission requires dozens of global, regional and local models while the European Center’s efforts are focused on a single model.  [emphasis mine]

NOAA lacks the organizational structure needed to catch up with or surpass its competitors according to University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass, who published a paper last year describing the factors that have held back U.S. forecasting.

Cliff's paper is here. Two paragraphs are particularly damning:

A particular problem for U.S. NWP efforts is the dissipation of considerable U.S. resources on redundant efforts among several federal agencies and national groups. Global NWP is performed operationally by NOAA/NWS, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, and NASA, each using a different modeling system (NOAA: GFS/FV-3, U.S. Navy: NAVGEM, U.S. Air Force: UKMO Unified Model, NASA: GEOS). In addition, NCAR/UCAR has developed Global WRF and MPAS models (Zhang et al. 2012; Skamarock et al. 2012) that are used by the academic community and applied operationally in the private sector and NOAA. The result of this multiplicity of competing global modeling systems is that U.S. financial, computational, and intellectual resources are divided among many modeling efforts, undermining the ability to concentrate efforts to produce a state-of-science system...

The U.S. academic community generally has not used NOAA models in research efforts, applying and making improvements to the UCAR/NCAR WRF/MPAS/CESM models, the University of Oklahoma Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) model, or the Colorado State Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) model. Thus, NWP advancements produced by the U.S. research community are rarely transferred to operational prediction systems. Conversely, advances by government modeling groups often do not feed back to the academic community.

As I count it, we have five federal agencies all doing the same thing... and, those results are not as good as the university community's results which do not make it into the others' model development. It is a tremendous mess. 

NOAA simply isn't capable of fixing this and doesn't seem to have the motivation to take it on. 

The National Weather Service should be made a standalone agency like NASA with adequate resources to do its job, something it doesn't have now. 

Second, we desperately need a National Disaster Review Board to help the NWS and other interested parties fix these and other problems related to extreme weather and geological conditions. The Review Board should also be tasked with keeping accuracy statistics of NWS storm warnings and forecasts. The NWS should not be reviewing itself.