Why Has Weather Forecasting Become So Poor?

When Hurricane Matthew began to move into the U.S. the national forecast estimated the hurricane to be a level 1, with "slight strengthening" expected on the night of September 29th. By morning, the hurricane had grown to a level 5 storm, and eventually killed over 30 American lives. This has not been the first time either that government forecasters have grossly underestimated the magnitude of a severe storm; Hurricane Patricia was expected to be little more than a tropical storm prior to its presence in the Southwest. Cliff Mass, a meteorologist at the University of Washington blames the epidemic on poor forecasting methods and lack of available computing power in comparison to the rest of the world. In fact, Mass points out that in 2015, the U.S. government began paying a government enterprise in Britain to finance weather-modeling software in the United States.

While seemingly irrelevant at its basic level, this lack of efficiency could be a matter of life and death when dealing with larger storms, such as Hurricane Matthew. Furthermore, the United States is well-known as the country with more government expenditures than any other nation, and Americans deserve access to complete weather information. Additionally, if high-ranking academics such as Mass, are bringing this issue to light, then this matter should be addressed at the federal level.

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