Rain, more rain, and Joaquin.

mfpark said:

grahamb said:
The moral of the story is to never prepare for a storm.

Or perhaps the moral is, if you prepare for it, it will not come.

Sounds like an endorsement for preparation to me.

Too soon?

-s.

https://youtu.be/i6zaVYWLTkU

So now we are getting ZERO rain this weekend?

It's raining in central CT, expected to stop by noon, and then we are expected to have cloudy skies for the remainder of the weekend. I'm awfully glad the hurricane missed the eastern seaboard.

Chance of light rain or drizzle today and tonight.

NYT: Hurricane Joaquin Forecast: Why U.S. Weather Model Has Fallen Behind

OCT. 2, 2015 Nate Cohn

For days, the models that guide the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts had
been split over the future of Hurricane Joaquin. Different models were sending

the storm to Cape Hatteras in North

Carolina or to Maine or to Bermuda. The official forecast — which held that
the storm would make landfall in the mid­Atlantic — was “low” confidence, as
the center put it. It was an attempt to compromise between models that
fundamentally disagreed.

Friday, the official forecast now takes Joaquin out to sea. A direct hit on
the East Coast can’t yet be ruled out, but the top models doubt it.
If this forecast holds, Hurricane Joaquin will yield one clear winner: the
model from the European Center for Medium­Range Weather Forecasts — or
simply, the European model — which consistently forecast that Joaquin would
head off to sea.

It’s not the first time that the European model has led the pack. It’s almost
a repeat of what happened with Hurricane Sandy, but in reverse. Three years
ago, the European model anticipated, far in advance, Sandy’s unusual “left
hook” into New Jersey. This time, the other models called for a left turn, and
the European model dissented.

It’s a familiar story for meteorologists who have been calling for vast and
attainable improvements in American weather forecasting for years.
Over the last few decades, faster computers, superior models and new
data have allowed all weather forecasting to improve, by a lot. But the United
States hasn’t quite matched that effort. It didn’t invest in computing power
and models that kept up with the potential for better forecasts.

By early 2013, the European model had nearly 10 times the raw
computing capacity of the Global Forecast System, or G.F.S., which is run by
the National Weather Service. There were other problems, too, and the
cumulative effect was obvious and irrefutable: The G.F.S. was doing worse
than it rivals, and it played out in high­profile cases, like Sandy.
After Hurricane Sandy, Congress gave the National Weather Service the
money for more powerful computers. In January 2015, The National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration announced that it had increased computing
capacity and begun running an upgraded model with higher resolution — a
more detailed prediction.

The upgraded G.F.S. prevailed over the European model in the blizzard
that largely missed New York. Many of the forecasts confidently calling for
high snow totals in New York were banking on the European model, or even
outright disregarded the G.F.S. But despite its early victory, the upgraded
G.F.S. is still behind. “The G.F.S. is still quite inferior,” said Cliff Mass, a professor of
atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “We are a clear third,”
behind the European and British models. “Maybe they’ve gotten one third of
the way.”

Additional upgrades — which will culminate in a nearly tenfold increase in
computing capacity — will help more, but simply upgrading computing
capacity won’t be enough to catch up. The problems run deeper, all the way
down to the description and modeling of the basic physics of radiation, clouds,
precipitation and turbulence, according to Mr. Mass.

Perhaps the biggest shortcoming is in data assimilation — the process of
taking all of the available data and building an initial description of the
atmosphere. The model runs from that, but a perfect model of the wrong
atmosphere will yield a wrong answer.

“It is clear that our initializations are inferior,” Mr. Mass argued. “That’s
the real problem. They have a lot more people and have taken a more
sophisticated approach.” Differences in initialization were probably at play in
the different forecast for Joaquin. “There’s a subtlety that the European center
is getting right that we’re not.”

In a statement, William Lapenta, director of the National Weather
Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, did not address
differences between the American and European models.He observed that “no
single model is correct 100 percent of the time.”

The European model’s data assimilation relies on more observations than
the G.F.S. — including satellite measurements of radiation from clouds, which
is crucial in areas with relatively few land observations. It also assimilates the
data over time, allowing the model to start with the evolution of the weather
heading into the forecast period, not just a snapshot.

The G.F.S. is making strides in this area, but Mr. Mass says there’s still a
long way to go.

Maybe it will be Joaquin’s false alarm, not another Hurricane Sandy, that
gets America to make the G.F.S. great again.

mem said:
Maybe it's not so much the climate change deniers that are driving the limited funding, but that there is a cost savings by using the data from the European model. Heck they use our stuff all the time.

Data goes in, solutions come out. There are several important reasons for having our own models, particularly as regards the west coast, where the Euro is less effective. Also, the military considers these forecasts part of the national defense infrastructure. But most importantly, all models are imperfect. Having a variety of models processing the data in a variety of ways results in better overall forecasting.

Did not know all this. It is embarrassing the the computational center of the universe is not devoting the horsepower to weather forecasting. Just embarrassing.