A letter from the NWS:
Greetings,
You are invited to take part in the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) Climate Services Customer Satisfaction Survey open until Wednesday, June 10^th 2009.
The NWS Climate Services Program is committed to meeting the needs of its customers through collaboration, partnerships, outreach, and training. The NWS Climate Services Program includes the Climate Services Division, the Climate Prediction Center, and the NWS Regional and Local offices. The NWS is researching user satisfaction with products and services provided by the Climate Services Program, and would appreciate your feedback. The purpose of this research is to help the NWS improve its climate products and services for you and others like you.
Your answers are voluntary, but your opinions are very important for this research. Your responses will be held completely confidential, and you will never be identified by name. CFI Group, a third party research and consulting firm, is administering this survey via a secure server. The time required to complete this survey will be dependent on how certain questions are answered, but it will likely take approximately 20 minutes, and is authorized by Office of Management and Budget Control No. 1505-0191.
Please Click Here:
https://svy.cfigroup.com/cgi-bin/qwebcorporate.dll?idx=GAFP8W
to provide your valuable feedback through the survey.
The deadline for survey responses is *Wednesday, June 10^th 2009*.
Please forward this announcement to your interested constituents and partners. Thank you very much and we apologize for any cross-postings as we are distributing this survey widely.
Ok, “wide distribution”, you got it, happy to oblige. Brace for impact. – Anthony
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I don’t need a climate change service. I need weather pattern variation prediction based on natural drivers so that I know whether or not to plant my spring wheat or stick with winter red. These are not decisions I can make 3 weeks prior to implementation. I need higher predictive accuracy a year or more in advance.
I have never had any ads or pop ups. I use an ad blocker and that may be the reason. At any rate, I would not mind anything since you are doing yeoman work for all of us. I will send the comments but have the usual reservations regarding the NWS.
Don B (13:35:13) :
You beat me to it.
When I think of Climate Services, I immediately think of climate alteration. Haven’t taken the survey yet, will get to it shortly.
Pamela Gray (17:22:19) :
I’m sure my distributor needs to know that too. They need to know where to do thier sourcing for the year, to keep the shelves stocked with their feeds. That would be an excellent service: adaptation to warming or cooling climate (and yes, weather-climate).
The sales reps eyes lit up when I told him of the Deep Solar Minimum. The sound of gears turning in his head were deafening.
I took the long road survey. My biggest beef is that predictions are wrong, wrong, wrong for areas of the country where there are crops. We don’t plant in the blankety blank fricken city park next to the water treatment plant and the weather sensor. I have a wheat field that is no where near telephone poles or electric wires, let alone a road that can be navigated with a car. Hell, Doppler radar doesn’t even cover it. The weather forecast is based on population centers, but I don’t give a rat’s ass if a city dweller misses the weather report and leaves the umbrella behind on a rainy day. However, they might get a bit testy with me if there is no bread on the table.
Pops – I’m running Internet Explorer with no ad blockers or anything. I get the text google ads but nothing flash based or anything that jumps out.
I would advise a malware scan as you may have something that pops up these ads on your system.
While not a commercial farmer. I agree with Pamela. All the weather forecast are for the nearest major population center with their as and heat. I grow to feed a large family and it makes a difference to me. I buy fertilizer and insecticide based on the temperature and precipitation forecasts and they are practically never correct. I have fertilizer in storage that has been in the barn for 3 years now. If they want to provide the service that they intend they need to get off their AGW high horse and use empirical data not corrupted by manipulation. They need to understand what drives the weather and use that for their models. I know that it isn’t exact but at least it should get close. Here in NE Alabama the prediction of a warm dry spring is so cool and wet that many farms haven’t been able to plant. Perhaps we should put some of this stimulus moneys into true investigation of our weather systems so that we can get a better understanding of what makes up our climate.
Don’t mean to be long winded but all we need is a division of NOAA to argue with each other and compete. I would love to see some investments in better surface stations properly located. new satellites with better sensors and raw data back to 1895 as advertised.
Bill Derryberry
Same problem here outside Atlanta as Bill had in AL. I geared up to work on my roof this past Tuesday based on a 5 am forecast calling for a 20% chance of rain. It began raining before noon over a widespread area that lasted several hours.
When there is a major storm system crossing the country, anyone in front of it can predict what the weather will be.
When conditions are setting up which are favorable to a weather change (e.g., sudden storm build-up, or the creation of a storm system), or there are no prevailing systems, models must be used to forecast what will happen.
And the models suck.
Will nobody out there take up the challenge?
There is an irony to this discussion. Mike Hall, now retired, was one of the individuals who played a key role in establishing climate change research in the Federal system in 1988 under George Bush Sr. Mike was responsible for the Office of Global Programs now known as the Climate Program Office. He, unlike his colleagues at other Federal agencies, deliberately chose to focus on climate variability rather than long term climate change. Because of his unit’s research and the operationalization of the work by National Weather Service we have a great deal of the information Watts up and other information sources present on El Nino and the PDO.
More importantly for this discussion the work by Mike, and later leaders, also recognized the need for linking that information to decision support. NOAA’s funding of research and operations associated with river forecasting and management, forest fire forecasting and logistics support, agriculture decision support, and drought management have made significant contributions to helping manage the impacts of climate variability and drought.
The challenge you identify, however, is that if the service focuses strictly on climate change given the ambiguities and discrepancies that exist about the concept it is possible that NOAA will find itself allocating resources to a mirage of a problem and ignoring the valuable work it is doing with regards to climate variability.
There may well be a need for a climate service but it is one that needs to be able to continue to advance the successes that have been achieved with seasonal and decadal research. On the long term trends it needs to have a enough room to manouver that should the current theory be falsified it is able to address what are considered currently as outliers in the mainstream thought such as global cooling due to solar variability.
Do I think a climate service could be of value? I do, but with the caveat that it is not trapped in focusing only on long term trends as understood by GCM output but rather is focused on addressing climate issues of value to decision makers across a range of temporal and spatial scales.
Given the scale of the current budget deficits the issue may rapidly become moot if significant budget cuts are triggered over the next 2-3 years.
Re. Nuclear energy –
Well I can sincerely say I hope you people are right about the radiation and residuals management for nuclear waste.
Pops: Running Mac OS-X here with Safari, and “Block Pop-up Windows” checked. I haven’t seen a single pop-up ad.
REPLY: That’s because there are no popup ads on WUWT, and I would NEVER allow any.. If you are getting popup ads, then your system is infected with malware or adware of some sorts. – Anthony