NOAA: A Case Study

Outage & In Danger – A Preliminary Investigation on Lack of Budget within NOAA Science, technology, engineering, & mathematics – alternatively STEM – is an evergrowing field in today’s society. Technology is increasing in popularity, and development of assistive tools in society are becoming more and more urgent for traditional use. Because of this, spending is required in the STEM field, but many feel that it is not needed. At first glance, one would think that the sectors of the government that keep us safe are the ones with the most funding, which is mainly true if you look at budgeting for the military. However, sectors within the Department of Commerce, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are lacking in budget due to focused spending elsewhere, which creates research and development – herein R&D – problems that may create outages and cost the lives of many Americans. This is
preventable! To first examine the problem, budgetary analysis is the first step in understanding what is going on within the government’s fiscal year budget decisions. As discussed in the PLS-135 class, it is known that many people would like to have spending focused on the military. This way, the American citizens may feel more “relieved” and “safe” from attacks. In general, according to usgovernmentspending.com, the federal government spends approximately $851.8 billion in the FY16 budget. This breaks down into $615.5 billion in military defense and $180.3 billion in veterans (Chantrill). Chantrill, the organizer of the chart, shows other federal spending numbers, such as education and general government, which are $119.2 billion and $49.9 billion respectively. “Other Spending” is a measly $46.7 billion, which is a difference of $805.1 billion, or a percentage of almost 5.48%. This percentage may seem small, but the dollar amount shows a significant difference in where everything lies. Within this $46.7 billion in “Other Spending,” readers can find “Basic research” at $18.1 billion. Americans may say “that doesn’t look too bad, why should they cut spending on the military and send it to agencies that have been working perfectly fine without this money for a long time now?” Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is a perfectly good answer as to why that is not a positive thing. Eric Holthaus of website Slate posted a blog article within their Future Tense section entitled “Big Technical Difficulties at the National Weather Service This Afternoon” in which discusses the 2014 blackout of radar data. “The outage lasted…32 minutes,” which may seem perfectly fine if this was a power outage (Holthaus). In the real world, with meteorological data, this is very, very poor infrastructure. As many have experienced, watches and warnings, which are distributed by the National Weather Service – herein NWS – offices in Norman, OK at the University of Oklahoma’s National Weather Center, and by local NWS offices. On May 22, 2014, the NWS Albany office had a significant radar outage where they were receiving radar data, but their “products,” which are the models and software that show a “picture” of what is going on in the sky, were not computing the data correctly and in time for them to analyze the picture and distribute warnings. Perfectly fine, right? That could be more wrong than it is to plagiarize, which is a major offense in many universities and colleges across the nation. On May 22, 2014, there was a national-level outage with communications at the NWS. This means every office could not read the data coming in and provide watches and warnings to citizens. In upstate New York, as the pictures in Holthaus’ blog post show, there was significant tornado damage found. Exponential damage happened during the 32 minute outage of the network and, thus, did not allow forecasters to send out a tornado warning to citizens that really needed it. “The outage comes as the latest in a series of recent technical glitches…a website crash in early April (though warning[s]…issued as normal through…channels).” Even the local Sterling NWS forecast office was having radar data issues as well, but the area, luckily, had no severe weather encroaching on the area. New Mexico was seeing radar data as old as 35 minutes. On top of this outage, the NOAA emergency alert radios in NYC were down, according to this same article. To argue why NOAA, and the Department of Commerce, needs more funding, here are some examples of what they have done; removing 57 tons of debris from a world heritage site, “…Response to Lake Erie Harmful Algal Bloom,” new radar modeling data, and even more (Sullivan 8). The PDF file of the FY 2016 budget summary for NOAA continues to identify what all, in the recent years, this agency has done for the greater good. The research and implementation of the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh model – herein HRRR – lead to greater pinpointing of information. The HRRR is able to “better [pinpoint] neighborhood-sized threats such as tornadoes…flash flooding, and heavy snowfall,” which, therefore, provides local citizens with more detailed information on what’s going on while delivering advanced warnings to these citizens. If safety and security isn’t an arguable reason to divert some budgeting from military spending to agencies that do R&D like NOAA, then what would be? Frankly, there isn’t another reason. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy posted in 2014 the FY15 budgeting.
In the PDF file, it clearly shows the embodiment of wanting to pursue STEM growth. Major concentration is put into R&D areas such as “[Sustaining] a World-Leading Science and Research Enterprise” and “Spurs Innovation.” This concentration of R&D within STEM is just an overall look at how NOAA’s budgeting and spending for R&D within their sector is just a minimal facet to the overall STEM budgeting and spending for R&D. In 2014, federal R&D was $133.7 billion and went up by $1.7 billion, or 1.2%, for the 2015 budget (The White House 1). Another big aspect of this budget proposal is understanding global climate change and the response of it. It can be argued that performing R&D budget increases within NOAA would assist in designing greater infrastructure that could lead to better detection of hundred-year storms that are becoming monthly events due to climate change. This R&D would help agencies better respond and present information to the greater United
States. Unanimously, it can be determined that an increase of budget and spending for NOAA to utilize in R&D is feasible by taking out some spending from the military. No, it is not being argued to create a major cut to the military, but to reduce it to what is truly needed in that field and deliver what is truly needed in other fields such as STEM R&D and general education and infrastructure needs. With this, we will have safety in both a military aspect, but in a meteorological aspect as well, eliminating fatalities along many lines.