China also invested significantly in technology like flue gas desulfurization 10-20 years ago, as well as other approaches which try to mitigate some of the impact of coal burning. So while bringing online coal power plants is obviously and can never be carbon neutral, a more appropriate comparison would be to measure the new plants' additional GHG and SLCP emissions, and compare that to the approach in the US.

It features a couple of AI and NWP model forecasts for comparison.

The short version of the "spectrum" issue is that 5G is being allocated in bands very close to the microwave spectra where atmospheric water vapor emits. A bevy of public and commercial satellites in low-Earth orbit passively monitor these microwave spectra and produce extremely important information that is assimilated into numerical weather models.

The federal government sets limits on "out-of-band emissions" for operators emitting in the allocated 5G spectra. These emissions can bleed over into the microwave water vapor bands, creating noise that masks the natural presence of water vapor. The limits for this out-of-band emission is on the order of ~10-20 dB, and there's some work in the atmospheric science literature suggesting that this is enough to confound certain water vapor retrievals. That basically means we lose these observations that help constrain the forecast.

There isn't much indication that this is a serious issue in day-to-day meteorology at the moment. But it's an issue which will be significantly more difficult to unroll and claw back than to simply protect key spectra in the first place.

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02643-w

That's a pretty apples-and-oranges comparison. One would almost always use a high-resolution regional model if you needed certain details for different forecasting applications like renewable energy.

It's also worth noting that the 5km outputs are from a model decoder head that was trained against temperature and dewpoint at surface stations. According to the Rasp et al (2026) preprint, this head was designed for continuous sampling; the choice of a 5km grid is arbitrary. What we don't actually know is how well the model handles shocks like a frontal passage or impacts from things like outflow from storms - or even evaporative cooling from precipitation. We are limited to the output that DeepMind publishes; we can't run the model and stress test these things on our own.

That's all a long way to say that the 5km resolution is (a) limited to temperature fields, and (b) we don't know if the "additional" resolution has any impact whatsoever on the phenomena that one would typically use a mesoscale-resolving forecast for.

The context is so important here and radically re-frames the impact of GDM's results. Folks need to understand that with modern forecasting tools, we anticipate tropical cyclones to develop 5-10 days before they ever threaten landfall. The "2-day" vs "3-day" improvement in forecast skill is better interpreted as a modest reduction in forecast uncertainty - the "cone" on the hurricane track map gets a little narrower.

It's not like there's a "literal extra day" of preparation time for folks who may be impacted by the storm. They get the same amount of time they always have. Nothing actually changes on-the-ground for really any consumer of hurricane forecast data anywhere in the world.

And that's not a sleight against GDM. It's just a simple statement of how good contemporary weather forecasting is, and how good it was before AI forecast models came onto the scene some 5 years ago.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49214815

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Because these aren't part of a plan specifically targeting NOAA. They're broad attacks on government infrastructure. The distinction is important.

> And acting like the things happening at the NSF don't have any relationship to data used for NOAA is another thing. Oh, it's just programs being axed at the NSF, no worries, they'd surely never touch NOAA. I'm sure data about ocean temperatures has absolutely nothing to do with weather!

How, specifically, does slashing programs at NSF lead to "privitization of NOAA"?

> Then why did DOGE happen? Why submit budget proposals slashing NOAA by a quarter??

Because _that's what Conservatives do_ in American politics. They virtue signal to their base and then run away from things as their efforts are neutered. Where have you been since the 2000? The executive branch doesn't set the budget, their recommendations to Congress are ceremonial at best. A cheap and easy way to generate optics without committing to actions with extremely negative repercussions.

Tell me - where are the Republican Congressional budget proposals which slash NOAA's OAR budget?

> Acting like these things aren't happening is continuing to ignore the foxes circling the henhouse. You were seemingly even unaware about the Regional Climate Centers going offline, telling me it didn't happen

Now you're just being disingenuous. You said they were cut - they _weren't_, they were caught in the blast radius of government funding shenangians in Congress along with hundreds or thousands of other programs. Show me an EO or a piece of legislation that eliminates the RCCs, will you?

> Thinking Project 2025 is just a conspiracy theory when they have been actively working towards many of these policy goals all because Trump told you an obvious lie. I'm sorry, but if you're one of the people supposedly there helping to ensure these programs have a successful future and don't see the obvious attempts to smash these programs it makes me even more worried about their futures.

No one said Project 2025 is a conspiracy theory.

It's not productive to waste time with you. You have no idea what you're talking about. But let me be very blunt - _you are making everyone's job harder_ by defaulting to Project 2025 and ascribing motives to actions where there aren't any. The Trump Administration _literally doesn't care_ about NOAA, and the agency has its defenders on both sides of the aisle in Congress who have actively responded to acute crises whenever the Admin's chaos creates them.

As the wailing about "muh NOAA is being privatized!" grows louder, it derails our interventions to safe harbor the agency because thoughtful, constructive compromise can be washed away as P2025 doomerism.

Stop exaggerating what's going on to win internet points.

> This is obvious evidence of them trying to fill the shortfall. If they were so well-staffed, would they be hiring so much? They have so many openings because they have a shortfall!

You do realize that the NWS was understaffed _before_ the administration and the DOGE cuts, right? We're also riding the crest of a retirement wave from the major restructuring that happened in the early 90's.

> They were, temporarily.

Because of funding lapses during the _government shutdown_. Like many _other_ agencies and offices. Geeze.

> This bumbling executive action is the Trump administration's attempt at restructuring...

It really isn't. Anyone who has been around the public-private nexus surrounding NOAA knows the folks who have been itching to overhaul NOAA, and they're not particularly subtle about it. Notably, none of them were brought into any administrative or leadership positions that could actually effect structural change at NOAA.

The reality is that despite its section in Project 2025, conservatives don't actually care about NOAA; they care about climate change and have used scalpels to excise key government programs relating to it. But NOAA has been shielded because of any executive agency, NOAA and the NWS have extremely favorable ratings from the public and are actively and vigorously defended by a bipartisan coalition in Congress.

> This is probably untrue. They've publicly announced more spending in 2025 than what they spent total in 2024 and that's just in big headline contracts. They haven't bothered reporting actuals in the 2025 CDP spend like they have for the previous decade. Huh I wonder why.

Everyone expected the CDP to grow following the success of EPIC and the maturation and adoption of JEDI has the next-generation data assimilation framework for our modeling ecosystem. Hell - part of NOAA's last major action plans in the early 2020's explicitly called for it to grow in scope!

The reason you don't see actuals from CDP spend is because (a) the government is dysfunctional and Congress is ignoring its oversight to actual make sure these numbers are published in a timely manner, and (b) very few awards have actually been given out. It took what, 4 years for the first microwave sounding data purchase to happen, and it was only a 1-year award to Tomorrow and OMS?

> So go read their budget proposals. Go see AMS' own worries about what the administration will do. Go see them talking about staffing shortages. See the fact the NWS isn't launching as many balloons. See the lack of staffing in Oklahoma during tornado season. See the elimination of public datasets at climate.gov, see those staffers who were laid off and never had those positions backfilled.

I do read the proposals. I spend time on Capitol Hill working through these budgets with offices in both chambers and from both political parties. I also spend time with the House Science and the Senate SST committee staff.

Yes, there are real issues that NOAA and the NWS face. And I would absolutely fault the federal government for not being _as aggressive_ at remediating these issues.

But you're cherry-picking issues to paint a significantly more sinister story than what is actually happening.

In 20 years worth of history - you can't identify a single piece of legislation or a single executive action to demonstrate an ongoing threat to NOAA? You have to immediately jump to the tautology of "Project 2025 is dismantling NOAA because an article two years ago said Project 2025 was going to dismantle NOAA"?