What If We Didn't Know Hurricane Sandy Was Coming?

[phantom power]

The New York Times reports that our weather-monitoring satellites -- which fly from pole to pole, crossing the critical zone around the Equator in the early afternoon -- are dying, and mismanagement and underfunding (generally resulting from Bush-era decisions or congressional Republican budgets) mean that replacement ones are behind schedule. ($182 million dollars for the weather satellites will disappear should sequestration -- automatic cuts looming in 2013 -- come to pass.) The result may be "a year or more" without the data these satellites provide. John H. Cushman Jr. reports:

Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launching of the next replacement, known as JPSS-1, has slipped until early 2017, probably too late to avoid a gap of at least a year.

Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite's managers are just beginning to think through their alternatives when the gap arrives, but these are unlikely to avoid it.

The mismanagement of the $13 billion program, which goes back a decade, was recently described as a "national embarrassment" by a top official of the Commerce Department.

...

NOAA recently conducted an experiment to see what the agency would have forecast when 2010's "Snowmaggedon" struck, had the agency only had buoys and weather balloons. With the lesser data, the models lowballed the snowfall by 10 inches.

In case you still aren't sure whether this data matters, "polar satellites" Cushman reports, "provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking the course of Hurricane Sandy."

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/what-if-we-didnt-know-hurricane-sandy-was-coming/264175/

[LovePeacock]

1. Too much science involved here. Conservatives are automatically against this elitist system.

[Drale]

2. In 1900 a Storm hit Galveston Texas

They knew there was a storm heading north because it had passed over Cuba but they had no idea where it was headed or how bad it was. By the time the government realized how bad it actually was it was to late to evacuate more then a few people and many people didn't believe it and refused to leave. Its still the second costliest at 99 billion dollars and still the deadliest at between 8000 and 12000 dead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900_Galveston_hurricane

[SheilaT]

3. There was also a belief that hurricanes could not possibly

strike Galveston. An incredibly good book about that hurricane is Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson. It also tells a lot about the development of the National Weather Service in the latter part of the 19th century.

[haele]

4. Closest example would be the 1938 "Long Island Express" hurricane.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_New_England_hurricane

It stayed pretty much mid-Atlantic, 400 - 500 miles off the coast, until it barrelled into Long Island with only a few hours warning (ship's radios, mainly) and killed over 800 people.

Haele

[BlueStreak]

5. Without knowledge, our only option is human sacrifices to try to win mercy from the gods.

[HopeHoops]

6. The closest historical comparison would be the 1938 hurricane on the same trajectory.