The water.noaa.gov redesign (the last 2-3 years) is considerably less usable on mobile. The old site was old, sure, but they were too interested in making it look and feel new, that they didn't prioritize the basic functionality.
I'm sure the team is well-intentioned, but it should have been done more thoughtfully.
I’d used it some and liked it, though I hadn’t used it extensively. At the very least, some of the parts that had already come out of it to the main site (like the interactive radar) were very useful and good upgrades.
Many years ago, I wrote a little script for scraping someone's weather site and returning the bare essentials for current conditions. The script began breaking down as they didn't support that raw HTML interface very well. Then at some point, I acquired a feature phone and I was interested in figuring out the currents/forecast as I was out and about. The KaiOS built-in web browser was functional but crippled, so again I had major issues accessing weather sites to find out what I needed.
I knew a colleague who is on a sailing team and I knew she would know weather, so I asked her, what is a good weather site without much ads and with a simple interface? And she replied immediately, weather.gov. I could have kissed her, because this was such an amazing and pragmatic idea I wouldn't have come up with on my own. And weather.gov has been my go-to weather site for probably 15 years.
It will suck if weather.gov's service is degraded in some way. No matter how many people hate it for existing, the USGov truly puts out excellent science and fantastic content. So much of it is publicly exposed, public domain, and in the service of the American people. It will be sad to watch this valuable infrastructure decay or be abandoned.
There was a comment here that I no longer see from someone that may work at Meteoblue (or majority shareholder Windy) which was very informative about various weather models. I think it’d be great if that person would write a post and share it, because I’d like to find a service that can provide the most reliable forecast dumps for our use in behavioral predictions.
The Meteoblue predictions seem sometimes much different from other predictions, and it was said that Meteoblue had a combined model that may be better than all other models, so I’d like to see some data.
beta.weather.gov Has Been Deactivated Until Further Notice
This page has been deactivated until further notice due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources required to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.
The National Weather Service remains committed to designing a more informative and user-friendly Weather.gov website, and we intend to reactivate this beta site as soon as resources are in place.
In the meantime, please continue to utilize Weather.gov as a source for official National Weather Service forecasts and warnings.
Thank you to everyone who has and continues to provide feedback to improve National Weather Service systems like beta.weather.gov!
I could barely care less because NOAA weather models are garbage. The NOAA GFS and NAM models are basically dinosaurs at this point compared to what Meteoblue is running. I've been tracking this stuff for ten years and it's not even close anymore. GFS still limps along at 13km resolution and only updates four times a day. Like, are we still in 2010? It completely screws up thunderstorm timing and can't handle mountains for shit. NAM isn't much better at 12km resolution, constantly busting rainfall forecasts especially in complex terrain.
Meanwhile, Meteoblue's models are on another level. NEMS cranks at 3km resolution and nails thunderstorms like 30% better than NAM. The German ICON model with its weird icosahedral grid is crushing GFS by 15-25% on wind forecasts. Then there's the European ECMWF model everyone knows it consistently beats GFS by at least half a day in accuracy. AROME is insane for mountain forecasts with resolution down to 1.3km, making NAM look like a joke with 40% better precipitation predictions. The real game-changer though is Meteoblue's multi-model approach, which averages out the errors from individual models and boosts accuracy by 20-35% over the old school GFS/NAM combo. I don't know why anyone still relies on GFS or NAM except for historical consistency or if you need a really broad overview. For anything specific or local, the newer models demolish them.
Can we get a disclosure on your experience and who you work for, if you’re going to weigh in so heavily on important public vs private sector issues like this?
It may be worth mentioning that NEMS and AROME are only available for parts of Europe. I'm willing to believe they are better, but here in Northeastern America I typically find that NAM is the best I have available for 3-day, and GFS is usually slightly better than ECMWF and ICON for long term (although none of the long term are great).
* cut the CDC, specifically the overseas pandemic tracking and response units
* withdrew the CDC Representative in China
* shutdown the PREDICT Program tracking coronavirus and zoonotic diseases
* Eliminated the Global Health Security Office
Basically T-balled Covid-19.
These people slash, burn and dismantle organizations that have successfully prevented disaster, then disaster happens.
We're going to see staggering levels of death and destruction from things like hurricanes because of this wild corrupt foolishness and I'm sure they'll blame it on some black person or woman somewhere, like they did with the bridge collapse and California fires
>Myers faced criticism in 2005 when he supported the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, a bill introduced by U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) that some argued would have prohibited the National Weather Service from publishing weather data to the public when private-sector entities, such as AccuWeather, perform the same function commercially.[34]
'Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
It said that “commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data.” Investing in commercial partners will increase competition, Project 2025 said.'
Trump tried to nominate the CEO of accuweather to run NOAA his first term, but was blocked. That CEO has lobbied to get Congress to limit the services NOAA provides so it doesn’t “compete” with companies like accuweather.
> The document describes NOAA as a primary component “of the climate change alarm industry” and said it “should be broken up and downsized.”
> Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
> It said that “commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data.” Investing in commercial partners will increase competition, Project 2025 said.
Should be enough from here for you to find your way with Google to further details, including the primary sources on the P2025 stuff.
> The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.
It's explicitly stated as an intentional plan, out in the open, loudly, documented, widely reported, going back many years in many outlets, both domestically and internationally.
If your head is so far up the right wing bullshit machine that you can't bother to find out this extremely widely documented fact then this comment isn't going to help you.
