QUESTION:
Is the partial government shutdown impacting your local forecast's accuracy?
ANSWER:
Nope.
SOURCES:
NOAA spokesperson
Howard Bernstein- WUSA9 Meteorologist
Dr. Peter Neilley- Director of Forecasting, Sciences and Technologies at IBM and The Weather Channel
PROCESS:
There's a lot of speculation about whether a partial government shutdown could impact the accuracy of your local news forecasts.
But we verified, any speculation is false.
Here's why: The National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is still up and running, pushing out models daily. That's because national weather forecasts are essential to human safety and well being.
"Much of NOAA National Weather Service operations are in excepted status and therefore remain in place to provide forecasts and warnings to protect lives and property," a NOAA spokesperson said in a statement. "With several storm systems impacting the country, staff continue mission-essential functions. In addition to forecasters at our local offices and national centers, appropriate technical and engineering staff are ensuring our Earth observations, high performance computing, modeling and other systems required to meet this mission are up and operating.”
We cross-checked with meteorology buffs at The Weather Channel.
"The models require fundamentally two things, lots of weather observations that are fed into then these models that run on super computers," Dr. Peter Neilley, Director of Forecasting, Sciences and Technologies at IBM and The Weather Channel. "For the most part that entire process is a completely automated process, the operation of satellite data, the operation of weather stations...and so there should be fundamentally no impact at all to the running of these models on the government shutdown."
The National Weather Service's models are virtually running on auto-pilot.
Meteorology PhD and weather model expert Ryan Maue took to Twitter and compared changes in the NWS's GFS models.
He concluded that there is no clear indication the models were at all worse-off because of a partial government shutdown.
The WUSA9 Weather team analyzes a myriad of weather models daily, to bring you your forecasts.
So, even if we didn't have the information from the National Weather Service, we still have plenty of resources to get you the most accurate information.
So we can Verify, any claims that you're going to get a less accurate forecast because of the partial government shutdown are false.