The NWS is totally useless and should be abolished. Local TV stations give much more accurate forecasts, have the newest weather tools available, and don’t cost taxpayers a dime.
Speaking as someone who loves weather, you all should check out Ventusky.com and watch the wind patterns for several weeks. [Lots of other stuff to watch,too, as you click the left side list.] When we heard about the huge amount of snow I went to ventusky.com and checked out the low going up the eastern seaboard...very small and very slow, slow. Also checked out wind pattern for Stella...very slow. I thought the two might meet but like a lover’s glance, a slight involvement. The low down in Florida was not advancing at that time so I discounted it.
That is not to say doing all that creates an infallible personal weather report. Not at all. But it was more accurate than the NWS this time.
The TV stations depend on NWS radar, radiosonde data, and other observations in order to develop their forecasts. The only thing they use that’s unique is their particular computer weather model.
Many weather channels get their info from NWS. NWS is an agency that is close to worth the taxpayer $$$.
Well. at least in our area, the local TV forecasters and the NWS forecasts are rarely if ever all that much different. If there’s a big miss, they all pretty much miss. And the minor misses (say, predicted low for a given night) tend to be a wash. NWS misses by a couple degrees one night, the next, the TV forecast misses and NWS nails it. They are all looking at pretty much the same models...
At least our local NWS Office sometimes admits the severe misses. A couple months ago, one day the NWS “forecast discussion” began with “we could not have been more wrong...” But, even that seems depends on the author and how “visible” the miss is. (In that case, we had a nice, somewhat warm, partly cloudy day, instead of heavy, cold rain, forecast for most of the day. But one night when the low was missed by, IIRC, over 10 deg. F (on the warm side), that was never mentioned again by any source I know of... I was well aware of it, though, having covered a bunch of plants needlessly. In both cases, all the forecasts I saw were very close to equally inaccurate.)
I have noticed more such misses, recently.
Now, what the local TV stations DO have in some cases is much cooler “real time” monitoring of events like hail or tornados. In a recent storm, a station to our west was using a tool specifically designed to pick up a tornado’s “debris ball”. It missed the (long track) funnel being on the ground much of the time it WAS on the ground, but, when the storm hit a town, the “debris ball” then became very obvious.
OTOH, NWS offers much much more historical data and follow up info (like damage surveys and such) than do TV stations. It also provides much more detail on a “24/7” basis. Plus, if one’s access is the internet, NWS radar is not cluttered by ads and such, it comes up fast (at least for me) and sometimes is available when other parts of the web go down for us. (Something about the local sourcing, I guess, as sometimes when our web service goes down for the most part, the NWS radar pages are still available.) Then again, sometimes we get the “Radar not available” message on the NWS pages, when all else is working....
I’ve also noticed in severe weather situations that the Local TV weather team members will often say that they are monitoring or contacting or trying to contact NWS for more information. I suspect they (Local TV & Radio Weather People) would tell us that the NWS is an indispensable resource for them.
And the local TV stations have their own weather forecasting computers and models? Where do you think they get their information to make their *own* forecasts*?
Do you know anything about meteorology?
Wrong. The TV stations are using NWS data to produce their product. It's packaged more pleasantly, but the data still comes from NWS information. I've ported lots of weather data collection software for multiple end users.