In Reply to: 16 dead in Missouri and Kentucky...... posted by bluebellknoll on May 17, 2025 at 05:26:45
"Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.
Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting."