From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog
Cliff Mass,
Many weather scientists have noted that NOAA’s global weather prediction model, the GFS, is now in fourth place, behind the European Center, the UK Meteorology Office, and the Canadians.
This is pretty depressing considering the U.S. spends more on weather prediction research and development than all those groups combined. This NOAA global model is the foundation of U.S. operational weather prediction efforts; thus, Americans are experiencing inferior weather forecasts as a result.
But it is worse than that.
NOAA global predictions have a severe “drop out” problem in which there are sharp, precipitous declines in forecast skill. Major declines in skill not shared by other major weather prediction centers.
Let me show you.
Below are the skills of various modeling systems from April over the northern hemisphere.
It evaluates the ability of models to get things right in the middle of the troposphere…around 18,000 ft (500 hPa pressure)–for a day 6 forecast. 1 indicated perfect score. Above about .8 the forecast is quite useful. Below ~.65 not so much.
The best forecast is the European Center (red line), while the US model (black line) is generally much less skillful.
Note that sometimes the US model skill drops like a rock to below .7 and on one date to below .6. These are drop outs…and represent severe loss of skill.
Note that the European model almost never does the same.
During the past few days (May 3-4), the U.S. model had another loss of skill (day 5 is shown in this graphic, with red being the US model, blue and black the European Center). Very bad.
Certain atmospheric flow patterns appear to give the US model a hard time. One of them is an omega block, in which a ridge (high) has two troughs (lows) on both sides.
In fact, we had a version of this during the past week (see below)
Important: this dropout problem has been going on for years and has nothing to do with budget cutbacks, fired personnel, or some weather balloons not being launched.
Let us be clear. The U.S. needs a vital, state-of-science NOAA, with weather prediction capabilities that are the best that weather science can provide.
Many of us in the weather community understand what is wrong with NOAA and have concrete ideas on how to fix this unfortunate situation. I have written two published papers on the topic and have served on several national committees that provided strong recommendations.
The current administration wants to fix NOAA and make American weather prediction “great again.” But during the first months of their tenure, it has made serious errors, such as mindlessly firing junior staff.
Will they talk to the meteorological community to develop a science-informed plan that could greatly improve U.S. environmental prediction and do so at a lesser cost than today?
I hope so. It would be a home run for the American people.
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