How many hundreds of people are employed by the NWS to sit at their desks and wait for a storm to form, no matter how minuscule the chances that they will be a threat to our coasts? Our well-equiped television weather stations can do the same thing with private money, not money from the federal government.
Case in point: For decades, the TV weathermen in Oklahoma City have been the best at warning viewers of approaching tornadoes, much harder than slow-moving hurricanes. The NWS, realizing this, decided to put the government’s weather center in Norman, 25 miles south of OKC, so they could get in on the action and cash their taxpayer-funded paychecks. They are totally redundant and a waste of money the US Treasury could use.
From their website:
Organization
The headquarters of the National Weather Service is located in Silver Spring, Maryland, with regional headquarters located in Kansas City, Missouri; Bohemia, New York; Fort Worth, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Anchorage, Alaska; and Honolulu, Hawaii. With some 5,000 employees in 122 weather forecast offices, 13 river forecast centers, 9 national centers, and other support offices around the country, NWS provides a national infrastructure to gather and process data worldwide. Each year, NWS collects some 76 billion observations and issues approximately 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 warnings.
“ell-equiped television weather stations can do the same thing with private money,”
My experience is those folks with the blow dried hair are simply just regurgitating NWS data. NWS has a lot of resources to collect data.
Thats one govt expenditure I don’t have a big problem with.
I’m a bit of a weather geek; I have the NWS site bookmarked as my only weather source.
If one reads their technical writing about what is going on; you can often be a half a day or a day ahead of the TV talking heads.