Why do we have the National Weather Service?

Most Americans can look down at their phone and see a prediction of the future. How is that even possible? Well, we'll tell you. Today it's all about the weather; from early predictive methods and almanacs to the National Weather Service's modern-day practices of collecting, analyzing, and sharing a staggering amount of data. First we talked with Kris Harper, a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and then with Felicia Bowser, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Florida. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:30Nick Capodice?

  This is Civics 101. I'm Nikita Padichai. Most Americans get their weather forecasts from their phones or their local news broadcast. But those weather forecasts aren't actually coming from your favorite weather app or your local meteorologist. They're coming from the National Weather Service, a so-called child agency of NOAA. And recently NOAA, as well as the Weather Service, have been the target of deep cuts and significant changes by President Donald Trump and DOGE, that is Elon Musk's quote-unquote "Department of Government Efficiency."

• 2:06Nick Capodice?

  Staff have been hastily fired and then attempts have been made to rehire them. There have been cuts to weather forecasting operations and the cancellation and lapsing of contracts. And this week, it was revealed that the National Weather Service is no longer translating its products for non-English speakers, potentially putting millions of Americans at risk of missing warnings about life-endangering weather. And as I am recording these words, tornadoes, flooding, storms, they have been pummeling the Midwestern and Southern United States for nearly two weeks, and the effects of those cuts are being felt within the agency and on the ground. So what is the National Weather Service?

• 2:51Nick Capodice?

  How does its work affect public safety, food production, even national security in addition to showing up on our phones? And when and why was this agency created in the first place? Today, we're talking about all of that in an episode we produced in late 2023. It's very relevant. Let's take a listen.

• 3:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Nick, I never knew I was afraid of tornadoes until I was in Alabama one night and the tornado radio started making noises.

• 3:26Nick Capodice?

  The tornado radio, Hannah? Was this produced by Michael Crichton?

• 3:29Hannah McCarthy?

  They're called weather alert radios, which is the sort of thing that you have in your possession if you live in a place where weather could otherwise interrupt all communication and also your power could go out. So it comes with a hand crank. But the point is that I lay there on a perfectly still night, listening to the occasional, and frankly, to me, terrifying sound.

• 3:49Nick Capodice?

  Now, for our listeners who are curious out there, we will not be playing that sound here, despite the audio medium, because it is, in fact, prohibited.

• 3:57Hannah McCarthy?

  That is right. People think that that applies only to the emergency alert sound, but actually, it is any sound that mimics or even sounds similar to that sound. And, you know, we don't need a fine. We are a listener-supported public radio. Anyway, through that sleepless Alabamian night, I realized... Okay, one thing, I am totally terrified of tornadoes. Who knew? And simultaneously, isn't it weird and special that I live in a time and place where this free alert happens to let me know that I could be whisked away to Oz at any moment? So how did this time and place come to be the sort where a terrifying noise pierces the radio waves when troubles come in?

• 4:40Hannah McCarthy?

  It's time to talk about every news outlet's favorite excuse for hyperbole: weather. This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 4:48Nick Capodice?

  I'm Nikita Padiyche.

• 4:49Hannah McCarthy?

  And to get specific here, I want to talk about the federal government's role in the weather, or at the very least, in how the government shares weather data with the public and uses it to give guidance about all manner of things. Today, we are talking about the National Weather Service, how it came to be, and later, what it is like to actually work there.

• 5:10Nick Capodice?

  Out of curiosity, Hannah, did you actually experience or see a tornado?

• 5:14Hannah McCarthy?

  I did not, and I acknowledge that there are bolder souls out there who might find my East Coast exceptionalism toward columns of decimating wind to be a little, you know, soft-handed.

• 5:33Speaker 06

  Okay, so I'm Chris Harper. I'm Professor of History and Philosophy of Grift Sciences at the Department of Science Education at the University of Copenhagen. And I was Navy Officer, a meteorologist and oceanographer for 21 years. I'm a retired commander. And then, as my meteorology friends would say, I went to the dark side and became a historian of science. And now I study the history of the atmospheric science.

• 6:00Nick Capodice?

  The dark side?

• 6:01Speaker 06

  Oh, well, because, you know, we look at archives and we're not out looking at the weather and forecasting and doing that kind of thing. It's all kind of fuzzy and not as solid science as my science buddies would like it to be.

• 6:17Nick Capodice?

  While we're on the subject of Chris's science buddies and the weather, there seem to be a lot of people out there who suggest that weather prediction is not as hard of a science as, you know, say biology or something like that. So what is with that? Is there any truth to that?

• 6:31Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so let's get into this for a sec.

• 6:33Speaker 06

  Many people didn't consider meteorology to be a real science. Or as one physicist put it, it was a guessing science. I mean, you know, be still my heart. I mean, that's just, I mean, really.

• 6:47Nick Capodice?

  All right, good to know.

• 6:49Hannah McCarthy?

  So is meteorology a real science? Yes. And every time I open my NOAA app to check the weather, that is confirmed by me through a combination of translated physics, statistics, geography, and chemistry.

• 7:03Nick Capodice?

  All right, you brought up NOAA, Hannah, and I think I've got this one. NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• 7:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Very well done.

• 7:10Nick Capodice?

  Thank you. Is that the same thing, though, as the National Weather Service?

• 7:14Hannah McCarthy?

  Actually, the National Weather Service is what you call a child agency of NOAA, which, by the way, shapes policies around climate, oceans, fisheries, coastal restorations. Basically, the National Weather Service sits under the NOAA umbrella. And they have a more focused mission.

• 7:32Speaker 06

  So the National Weather Service, which has had a variety of names over its lifetime, its mission is to provide weather services to the public, to keep the public safe, to provide forecasts that help agriculture and industry.

• 7:49Nick Capodice?

  Now, that last part, agriculture and industry, that is something that I was not expecting.

• 7:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, and this ties into where the National Weather Service actually fits in the organization of the government. While many of the earth science, research, and policy groups are housed under the Department of the Interior, because of the origin story of the government's interest in weather data, the service part is part of the Department of Commerce.

• 8:12Nick Capodice?

  Okay, so there's that industry tie in. So what exactly was the National Weather Service doing when it was originally founded?

• 8:20Speaker 06

  So we first see the United States get involved in collecting weather information in the early part of the 19th century.

• 8:32Nick Capodice?

  Now, hold on a moment. I happen to know something about that. A Little Almanac by Mr. Benjamin Franklin. But that was published way back in the middle of the 18th century.

• 8:42Hannah McCarthy?

  That is right. Almanacs were a very popular publication in North America, and Ben Franklin did, in fact, publish one called Poor Richard's Almanac. And it, like other almanacs at the time, did contain weather predictions. They also had puzzles and witticisms. Poor Richard's was wildly popular. Now, The Farmer's Almanac is still in publication today, but that particular publication started out in 1818. There is also, Nick, another almanac called The Old Farmer's Almanac. Two different things. By the way, The Farmer's Almanac claims to have an 80 to 85% accuracy rate and claims the bragging rights of having been predicting the weather since before the National Weather Service existed

• 9:25Hannah McCarthy?

  and having been right about a number of major weather events, which is true. However, their accuracy has been analyzed, and it has been found to be closer to 50%.

• 9:35Nick Capodice?

  Still not that bad.

• 9:36Hannah McCarthy?

  So farmers had been predicting the weather for basically as long as they'd been working the land and observing the weather. But in the early 19th century, things really started to pick up.

• 9:47Speaker 06

  So people started to specialize. And at that point, you see more people taking weather measurements and keeping track of them in a systematic way, often related to astronomical observatories. Because, of course, if you're trying to look at the planets and the stars, it's a real bummer if it's cloudy and raining, right? So those people were taking weather observations. So the initial weather observations were often coming from astronomical observatories. And then they would show that information. And slowly over time, by the middle of the 19th century, they were figuring out how to use that information in a way that made sense.

• 10:32Nick Capodice?

  Sharing that information, as in beyond the publication of an almanac.

• 10:40Speaker 06

  We see the rise of teletype, so you can send the information more quickly. You can have great weather information, but if you can't get it to anybody, oh, well. I mean, that doesn't do you a whole lot of good, right? So we see the Smithsonian was involved. We see observatories that were involved. There were universities that were involved. So you have this loosely net collection of people who were putting observations together and trying to make sense of them. Meteorology isn't so much a science at this point. It's more of a collection activity.

• 11:18Nick Capodice?

  Oh, wow. So this is like crowdsourcing before there was such a thing as crowdsourcing, but with weather data.

• 11:23Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes, and the network grew. In the mid-1800s, the Smithsonian supplied telegraph offices with basic weather instruments. And in turn, those telegraph offices would submit their observations to the Smithsonian, which would make weather maps. By the end of 1949, there were 150 volunteers making observations. By 1860, there were 500 stations nationwide submitting reports to the Washington Evening Star.

• 11:58Speaker 06

  And then by 1870, we see the formation of sort of the first national weather service without that being its name, under the auspices of the US Army Signal Corps.

• 12:12Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, what exactly is the Army Signal Corps?

• 12:15Hannah McCarthy?

  So it's still around. It was created just before the Civil War as the branch of the Army that was in charge of communications. And by the way, the guy who came up with the Signal Corps ended up being the same guy who ran the Weather Service about a decade later. And while his real name was Albert J. Meyer, his nickname was Old Probabilities.

• 12:35Nick Capodice?

  Old Probabilities, as in this will probably happen today and this probably won't. This probably didn't help the reputation of meteorology as a hard science.

• 12:45Hannah McCarthy?

  Nicknames aside, the data was important.

• 12:49Hannah McCarthy?

  Especially prior to the widespread use of electricity, being able to predict the weather was pretty essential.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  And originally, the observations were taken by the medical corps in the Army because they considered it important for people's health. And the Army outposts, I mean, we're talking forts and that kind of thing, right? Out, out west, they had teletype. And so they could send those reports in. And then by 1890, Congress passed a resolution that formed the US Weather Bureau as an entity and assigned it to, you know, make forecasts for agriculture, to make forecasts for industry, to keep people safe, to, to do near shore kinds of forecasting, even included volcanology.

• 13:39Speaker 06

  You know, volcano things were part of their original mandate. So by 1890, you're seeing the professionalization of meteorology.

• 13:51Hannah McCarthy?

  The early 1900s saw the explosion of weather useful technology. The Weather Bureau was using airplanes and weather balloons. They were able to do things like tell farmers in the West how much water would be available for irrigation in the coming season. After the Titanic disaster in 1912, the Coast Guard began an international ice patrol. That same year had the first fire weather forecast. Natural disasters like floods and hurricanes were always spurring new weather innovations. And I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but the Hoover Dam completed in 1935, that could not have happened without rain and flood predictions,

• 14:32Hannah McCarthy?

  which allowed for a relatively, or compared to the alternative, safe construction. Within 24 hours, the Colorado River under control for the first time in its history. Was blowing around and past the dam site through the huge diversion views. Also, with this lickety-split progress, you saw the first-ever meteorology program crop up at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• 14:56Nick Capodice?

  Wow, just in case anyone out there was still wondering if it was a real science.

• 15:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Just in case. All right, now, finally, in 1940, a year before the US entered World War II, the Weather Bureau was assigned to the Department of Commerce.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  President Roosevelt said, "We need to build 60,000 aircraft for the war effort," which also means you need at least 60,000 pilots to go in them. And you also need weather forecasts for those pilots.

• 15:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, pretty famously, in World War II, the decision to invade Normandy in 1944 was based on a weather forecast. D-Day was delayed by 24 hours, big risk, to allow for a break in rough weather, a break that the Axis forces did not predict.

• 15:43Nick Capodice?

  Oh, it is amazing to think that something as massive and world-defining as D-Day was in part about the weather.

• 15:50Hannah McCarthy?

  It was very much about the weather. And the US had a more robust weather operation going than Germany did at the time. But back to the Department of Commerce thing. National security is certainly bound up with war games, but it is also pretty bound up with the economy. That's why the Weather Bureau ended up in Commerce instead of Defense or Agriculture. But it's not like the agricultural part of the government's interest in weather data went away.

• 16:17Speaker 06

  There were still crop forecasts. I mean, there were still fruit frost warnings and, you know, fire weather warnings and all those kinds of agriculturally-related things. But aviation was huge. And so it left agriculture and was moved into Commerce.

• 16:32Hannah McCarthy?

  There's this other element that I found pretty fascinating. After World War II, you had all of these people who had been studying the weather on behalf of the government. That was their wartime job.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  We have these thousands of people, men, almost all men, trained to be meteorologists during the war, and then the war is over. What are they going to do with all of these meteorologists?

• 16:56Speaker 06

  Well, some of them decided to do other things. Some of them went to graduate school. And some of them decided to become consulting meteorologists. That they would provide tailored forecasts for a given customer. Now, that's not something that the National Weather Service does. Because that's not their job. Their job is to keep the nation safe and the people within the nation safe. That's their job. So what consulting meteorologists did was they provided specialized forecasts to construction people, to people who were growing certain kinds of crops, to engineers

• 17:36Speaker 06

  who were working on projects, to people who grew certain kinds of crops and needed to figure out how to get them safely someplace. Sometimes to sports teams, were they going to be able to play on the weekends or not.

• 17:53Nick Capodice?

  Wow, private meteorology.

• 17:55Hannah McCarthy?

  That is how it happened. And today, there's a multi-billion dollar commercial weather industry. It wasn't the role of the Weather Bureau to provide small-scale predictions for for-profit interests, and it is not the role of the National Weather Service to do predictions for profit. But today, they do provide data that helps to drive nearly every weather product used by businesses and consumers alike.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  That's the difference between the National Weather Service. They're the ones that collect the massive amounts of data, for the most part, which is very expensive. I mean, the infrastructure for that is really, really expensive. That's why the government does that.

• 18:32Nick Capodice?

  By the way, Hannah, predicting the weather, it can't just be about what's happening within our own borders, right? Like, I get maybe keeping our weather predictions out of the hands of enemies back in the day, but today, we have a global interest in sharing weather data, don't we? Hurricanes and tsunamis don't care about borders and conflicts.

• 18:51Hannah McCarthy?

  That's right. The UN, who else, established the World Meteorological Organization in 1950. They also set the standard for monitoring the weather, because if we weren't all doing it the same way, we would have no real way of knowing what was really going on or coming our way. In the 1961 State of the Union, President Kennedy actually invited the world to join the United States in developing an international weather prediction program. Finally, this administration.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  Intends to explore promptly all possible areas of cooperation with the Soviet Union and other nations to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Specifically, I now invite all nations, including the Soviet Union, to join with us in developing a weather prediction program in a new communication satellite program.

• 19:45Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, today there are big weather data centers where international weather agencies like the National Weather Service share their data with everyone.

• 19:52Nick Capodice?

  When did the Weather Bureau actually get that name, that National Weather Service?

• 19:56Hannah McCarthy?

  That was not until 1970. And what's important to keep in mind is that all along the way, the public was able to access this weather information as they are now. And it was thanks in large part to the media, which discovered how much we love weather forecasts.

• 20:14Nick Capodice?

  Actually, I do want to ask about the public thing here, Hannah, because for one thing, I check my weather app every single day. And I think a lot of people out there do. And also, like probably a lot of people, I am guilty of the classic, well, they didn't say it was gonna rain, you know? There's often this sense of, well, the meteorologists got it wrong again, which I think is where this idea that it's an art and not a science might come from. So how inconsiderate are we being exactly when we get vaguely annoyed at the Weather Service?

• 20:47Speaker 06

  I think it's important for people to know that the forecasts that come from the National Weather Service have over an 85% verification rate.

• 20:59Nick Capodice?

  Well, that's pretty good.

• 21:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, it's pretty good for something that tells you what the future is going to look like.

• 21:05Speaker 06

  So people think, oh, man, you know, like, they never get it right. But I can tell you, having been a meteorologist myself and been on the forecasting end and been on the end of phone calls from people who were not happy with what was going on outside their door.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  Is that we tend to remember weather that interfered with what we were planning to do, whether that was a smart thing to do or not. And we don't remember all of the days when the weather was good for us. And so we really weren't paying attention to what the forecast was because we didn't need to, because it was really nice outside. And by really nice outside, for most people, that means the sun's out, the wind's not strong, and it's not too hot. And if you've planned a garden party and it rains on you, and you weren't expecting that rain, or there's, as I call it, two feet of partly cloudy sitting on your front

• 22:04Speaker 06

  stoop that has to be shoveled off, then you're not going to be really happy about that. And it may have been forecast for you, but you're still not happy about it because it interfered with what your plan was.

• 22:18Nick Capodice?

  Oh, wow. It sounds like meteorologists can't really win, can they?

• 22:22Hannah McCarthy?

  I mean, I keep thinking about that thing of being a child and expecting a blizzard and a snow day, and then not getting either, even if a meteorologist told you it was going to happen. But we really need to remind ourselves that that is not the National Weather Service's fault. All right, Nick, I want to take a quick break here, but when we're back, you and I are going to hear from someone who probably deserves a bashful apology from a lot of Americans who raised a fist to the unexpectedly rainy heavens.

• 23:00Nick Capodice?

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• 24:20Nick Capodice?

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• 25:05Nick Capodice?

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• 25:26Speaker 02

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• 25:46Nick Capodice?

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• 25:49Speaker 01

  I don't know what I'm doing. Need a break. Forget it, I quit. Escape to Pluto TV.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free. Schwing. Even our news is uplifting. You stay classy, San Diego. Watch Tommy Boy, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The Ex Files, Wayne's World, and so much more. We're not worthy. The best things on TV really are free.

• 26:13Speaker 02

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• 26:23Nick Capodice?

  We're back. We're talking about the National Weather Service. And Hannah, just before the break, you hinted that we might be meeting someone inside the National Weather Service.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  My name is Felicia Bowser, and I am the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Florida.

• 26:41Nick Capodice?

  I feel like when it comes to weather, the stakes are pretty high down in Florida.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  In a typical weather forecast office, we are in charge of pushing out a seven-day forecast. We don't go beyond seven days because it can, the computer models can get a bit fuzzy, a little bit dicey, a little bit beyond that, let alone as we enter the sixth and seventh day. So we don't go beyond seven days. And of course, people will see that forecast is if it's going to rain, is it going to be sunny, what's the temperature, that type of things. So we do issue that basic forecast.

• 27:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Felicia says that the National Weather Service in Tallahassee also does things like work with health departments and the Red Cross and the State Department of Emergency Management, all to let them know whether it's going to be rain or shine. They send out what Felicia calls "weather packages" via email to help entities around the state be prepared.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  As a result, because of that, our footprint is pretty active in the sense that we get a lot of requests to do what's called Decision Support Services, or DSS for short. And what that is, is a good example would be, let's say, there is the governors in inauguration, which is what we helped with as far as providing um what the forecast is going to be leading up to the inauguration earlier this year. And of course, the day of. And so um if I recall correctly, it was looking like there was going to be some chances for some rain and

• 28:21Speaker 02

  there's a lot of moving parts that they had to get in order because there was going to be a helicopter flight. And of course, that's important to know if it's going to rain and whatnot.

• 28:29Nick Capodice?

  Okay, so the governor's office is doing a little bit more than just checking their weather app and booking a helicopter based on what they see there.

• 28:35Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, so that's a common part of the everyday of being a National Weather Service meteorologist in the US. And in Felicia's case, communicating with these various parts of the government and private entities in Florida. Felicia refers to them as partners, by the way. But then there are the millions of others who are dependent on that information, too.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  So communicate with the public. We would do things such as Facebook posts. We would put out videos just letting people know what's what's what to prepare for, how they need to get their hurricane plans in place and and things of that nature, um just to make sure that they get prepared for their homes and their families. So there's that aspect.

• 29:16Nick Capodice?

  Okay, yeah, and hurricanes. Now we're talking about Florida here. What does it look like when a state like Florida has to predict and prepare for a major storm?

• 29:27Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, so let's take, for example, Hurricane Dahlia. When it comes to a major storm, the National Weather Service looks inward. They got on phone calls with the National Hurricane Center, which is a division of the National Weather Service that just so happens to be headquartered in Florida.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  So a lot of times they talk to the offices that's going to be most Impacted, of course, when it comes to a hurricane. Um, but they also have what's called a a pre-call. So you have the the main call where um any office can can can log in and listen in on what the uh Hurricane Center has to say about a particular storm. But there is a call prior to that where they're just speaking to the offices that are most directly impacted. And of course, during that storm, we were uh directly impacted because it it made landfall in our air responsibility.

• 30:25Nick Capodice?

  Okay, but what are these meteorologists actually talking about on these calls?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  If they're seeing a little bit of a track shift. Or is it still in line? Has anything changed when the um the reconnaissance aircrafts went through it? Has it strengthened? Okay, it strengthened. How much has it strengthened to? And so they're telling us this information prior to telling it to everybody else. Just so that uh we can be prepared to um to make any changes on our end. And that would be conveying that information about why the forecast has changed, why the track has changed, why the intensity has changed. Being able to then translate that information to our partners and the public in a scientifically way and also in a way that they understand.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  So it's not overly scientific because we want to be able to prepare them as well.

• 31:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Basically, many members of the public will have no idea what to do with the scientific data the National Weather Service is collecting. We need it translated for us. I should say, though, not all members of the public. You know how the National Weather Service started off with people scattered across the country, volunteering observations that could be sent to the Smithsonian in DC? Well, the volunteer thing is very much alive.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Is basically called uh Cocoroz. Cocoroz um basically is a public volunteer service where people will have their um rain gauges at their office, um at their homes, excuse me. And they will tell us how much rainfall has fallen. There's a, there's a website that they all can go to and input this information. They'll tell us what their um. Temperature was, they're high and low temperature. This is purely volunteer. They, they don't get paid for this. So this is definitely out of the kindness of their heart to do this. But yeah, any, anybody can do this. If somebody was to Google COCO Raz, they can go in there and see what it,

• 32:27Speaker 02

  the type of equipment that they need to purchase to do it.

• 32:30Nick Capodice?

  COCO Raz. So in lieu of Googling Hannah, what does it mean?

• 32:34Hannah McCarthy?

  It means the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network. And I really love that it exists because I love civic participation and having a small scale weather monitoring station in your backyard is commitment to the cause.

• 32:52Hannah McCarthy?

  So one last thing that's pretty important here. If you go to the National Weather Service website, you're going to find a truly detailed, like more detailed than I have yet to discover on any other federal website timeline. Someone at the National Weather Service really appreciates their history. And in the most recent history, you're going to see words like record breaking, increasingly vulnerable, deadliest, billions in damages. Now whether you're a member of COCO Raz or not, the weather is going to be pretty in your face in years to come. So I want to go back to Chris Harper for a minute here because she addressed that new challenge with those big ominous vocab words and what that means for the meteorologists behind our weather information.

• 33:37Speaker 06

  It's a lot trickier than it used to be because what we're seeing is storms that are carrying more moisture. We're seeing sea surface temperatures that are really, really warm, which is basically providing the engine that's keeping hurricanes going. And they, they spin up faster than they used to. So like this last one went from like almost nothing to a category three, like overnight.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  I can tell you as a forecaster, if I'd seen something like that while I was still doing weather forecasts, I would have thought, oh my, we're in trouble here. You know, this is, this is just not acting like a normal kind of system, which should take days, days to do. So it will get trickier, it will get trickier to do. It's not that the models can't handle it, the models can handle it, but people need to be ready to pay attention and realize that when a storm's coming in, it may be a lot more severe than it's been in the past.

• 34:39Nick Capodice?

  What I think's pretty interesting about the National Weather Service, Hannah, is that despite our griping about when the data doesn't match our hopes and expectations, or even the politicization of weather, which has become a thing, one major and clear goal of this agency is just keep people from being swept away in a tornado, because we can all agree that would be bad.

• 35:01Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at the US as an organism with many parts that need to be kept healthy, from the economy to national security to the safety of its inhabitants, the National Weather Service is like the doctor you mostly forget about until you get sick and then really need to be told what to do. The National Weather Service quite literally works to keep the US alive.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  So the National Weather Service, you know, their mission is to keep people safe and to provide people with the best forecasts they can based on the data that they have and the expertise of their meteorologists, who are really dedicated folks, who are looking out specifically for the people who are in their forecast area. Big hand to all the National Weather Service forecasters, the observers, everybody who are on their team, because, you know, it's one thing when it's a string of nice days, but when the weather turns bad, they have a really tough job just trying to get the

• 36:03Speaker 06

  information out to make sure that people don't inadvertently put themselves in harm's way, because the weather, the weather is not going in a way that people might expect.

• 36:34Nick Capodice?

  This episode was produced by Hannah McCarthy and me, Nick Capodice. It was edited by our executive producer, Rebecca Lavoy. Our staff includes senior producer Christina Phillips and producer Marina Henke. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound. For more on the government agencies and departments that affect the way we live and work, check out our many, many episodes at our website, civics101podcast.org, or on your favorite podcast app. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Did you know that if your spouse goes missing and you don't tell anyone, that's not necessarily a crime? That surprising fact is at the heart of the brand new season of Bear Brook, the critically acclaimed true crime podcast from New Hampshire Public Radio. I'm your host, Jason Moon. In this season, Bear Brook investigates another New Hampshire mystery. A Christmas tree farmer with dementia vanishes. His wife never reports him missing. Can he still be found? Don't miss it. Follow Bear Brook wherever you get your podcasts.

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