During a Senate Commerce Committee Hearing on Wednesday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke about possible upgrades to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather modeling and emergency warning systems following flooding in Kerrville, Texas that killed over a hundred people.
00:07You and I discussed at length yesterday the flooding that occurred in Texas and the tragedy that unfolded.
00:15As the head of NOAA, which oversees the National Weather Service,
00:20if confirmed, what will you do to better ensure that Americans are aware of and able to respond to emergency weather warnings,
00:29especially those that arrive in the middle of the night?
00:33Thank you for the question.
00:35As I said in my opening statement, numerical weather prediction and advancing that is a top priority.
00:41And the Weather Service did a great job.
00:46But there's a lot of things I would love to improve, obviously, weather forecasting being one of them.
00:52I'd also love to advance and modernize NOAA Weather Radio.
00:56No weather radio saved my life in 1996.
01:01There's a lot of other things we can do as far as communications because, as you said, even if the forecast is perfect,
01:08getting the warnings to the people, particularly at late hours of the night, is a challenge.
01:13I think we can do more advancements moving away from copper wire, moving towards telecom, potentially satellite, to send out these messages.
01:23We also need more data in doing post-storm assessments.
01:29One of the things that I've envisioned, because I've worked on several aviation accidents within TSB,
01:35is something along the lines of what they do, but for weather disasters.
01:40Because we need the data to understand what went right, what went wrong, whether people got the warnings, if they did or didn't.
01:46And if they did, did they not understand them?
01:52You mentioned that NOAA Weather Radio had saved your life.
01:55Would you elaborate on that and tell us what happened?
01:57I was at a campsite in Florida with some friends, and it issued a tornado alert.
02:03And it was about 10 p.m., and this was back before I had a cell phone or a smartphone.
02:09And I took out a gazetter, and I looked at the towns that it mentioned along the way,
02:13and I extrapolated the direction, which was right over where I knew we were.
02:17And so I drove around the campsite and held my horn down and told as many people as I could to leave, and everyone left.
02:25We went further down the coast to a hospital and went into the emergency room because it was the closest brick building.
02:32When we went back to the campsite, it was nothing but bare dirt.
02:36Wow.
02:38In 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated entire communities all up and down Texas' Gulf Coast.
02:50The damage to our state was well over $120 billion and may prove to be closer to $180 billion when all is said and done.
02:59Texans prepare for hurricanes and flooding by using NOAA's weather forecasts.
03:05But European numerical weather prediction models have been outperforming U.S. models in forecasting.
03:12It's a question for both Dr. Jacobs and Mr. Jordan.
03:15If confirmed, how do you plan to close the gap and ensure that NOAA's forecasts are the best in the world?
03:22Closing the gap was going to require a mix of collecting more and better observations because these prediction are initial value problems.
03:30They all start from better observations.
03:33And then data assimilation.
03:35So the joint effort for data integration and data assimilation system.
03:39One of the reasons why the Europeans have a better model than the U.S.
03:42is they use four-dimensional variational data assimilation.
03:45The U.S. needs to advance its data assimilation work and also consolidate its modeling systems across resolutions of time and space.
03:54Mr. Jordan.
03:56I agree with Dr. Jacobs.
03:58So of the pillars of creating a weather forecast, you have model code development.
04:03You have observations.
04:04You have data assimilation.
04:06And you have supercomputing or HPC to run the forecasts.
04:10As far as observations goes, we absolutely need to push the technology stack forward and ingest new sources of data.
04:17But the Europeans also have that same data.
04:21So, you know, what's the difference between the American modeling and the European modeling?
04:26It's part of it is model code development and data assimilation.
04:29And I think we need a targeted investment into data assimilation to make sure that we can push that ball forward and have a better weather forecast.
04:39Dr. Jacobs, one of the things you and I talked about yesterday was your vision for expanding cloud computing for weather forecasting.
04:47Can you describe what you envision there?
04:50Sure.
04:51So, one of the things that I think would be a tremendous leap forward for the National Weather Service is the system that they process the information on called AWIPS.
05:04They have to download the data locally.
05:07And the higher resolution files get, whether it's data or model output, the longer it takes them to get that information.
05:13That's one issue.
05:14The other issue is they have to be behind the computer to do this work.
05:18And I think transitioning this software to the cloud so they're actually uploading the code instead of downloading the data, as well as having the ability to have a laptop so they can access it from anywhere.
05:30It not only improves their ability to get the data faster, but it would allow a forecaster from anywhere to do a forecast for anywhere.
05:39And so you were saying this would enable forecasters from the National Weather Service to embed in an emergency operations center and be right there on the ground in a crisis.
05:47Correct.
05:48Correct.
05:49Yeah, they could literally work from anywhere.
05:51And so embedding in the emergency management centers, particularly during major weather events, would be really advantageous.
05:58Okay, last question.
05:59It is an ongoing problem, particularly in South Texas, dealing with illegal Mexican fishermen, lanches coming and illegally fishing Texas red snapper.
06:11The Coast Guard fights against it.
06:12The federal government fights against it.
06:14This illegal fishing is actually paid for by Mexican drug cartels in many instances.
06:20Dr. Jacobs, what more can NOAA do to combat the problem of illegal fishing in Texas?
06:26I appreciate the question.
06:28IUU fishing is another top priority of mine.
06:33As you know, just recently, 40 tons of red snapper were seized at a port in Brazil that were headed towards the U.S.
06:40As well as this last April, around 700 pounds of red snapper was seized just off of Brownsville from Mexican fishermen
06:49that were illegally fishing in U.S. waters.
06:52I think it's a mix of new technology.
06:55There are ways when these boats turn off their transponders to track them through satellites.
07:00I also think as part of combating IUU, the Seafood Inspection Monitoring Program, beefing up that,
07:07actually looking at potentially not just for like fishing, but like aquaculture things like shrimp that are brought into the U.S.
07:15A lot of people aren't aware, but almost all that shrimp is mislabeled.
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