Meanwhile, NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC), Google DeepMind, and Google Research have agreed to explore how a new artificial intelligence weather forecast model can be used to improve the forecasting of hurricanes and other hazardous tropical weather

I would respectfully suggest they can't, or it's a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Weather models can't be improved unless they have access to observations.. Which it seems like NOAA will be able to do, but might not be willing to share the observation data.

I think this gets interesting given current events in Texas. Apparently people that used weather services didn't get warnings of either flash floods, or even heavy rainfall. There's been various finger pointing and blaming the US NWS (National Weather Service) which did provide advance warning.. It's just that people relying on their weather apps didn't seem to get those alerts.

I looked into this after seeing a tweet blaming the NWS "because DEI". The NWS San Antonio twitter account issued numerous flash flood warnings for exactly the place that was affected prior to it happening.

I'm not familiar with the area (I'm on the other side of an ocean) so I don't know if there was a breakdown in communication or if flash flood warnings are so frequent that people got complacent because, well, because this sort of thing doesn't happen....until it does.

I'm not familiar with the area (I'm on the other side of an ocean) so I don't know if there was a breakdown in communication or if flash flood warnings are so frequent that people got complacent because, well, because this sort of thing doesn't happen....until it does.

Wiki has an answer-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_River_(Texas)

The river, and the larger area around it known as Texas Hill Country, is prone to flash flooding. Its nickname is “Flash Flood Alley”.

and..

Flooding began on July 4, after massive amounts of rain fell on Central Texas. Six flash flood emergency warnings, which included the cities of Kerrville and Mason, were issued the same day. The following day, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told a press briefing that the Guadalupe River had risen about 26 feet (7.9 m) in 45 minutes

So probably some element of wolf-crying and complacency. I also wonder if population changes had an effect. So people who've lived around the river all their lives should have been more aware of the flood dangers than people who've just moved there. I did some training in Huntsville, AL and one of the first things we got was a safety briefing about not ignoring tornado warnings because it was often newcomers that did, and were killed or injured.

But given the severity of this flood, it seems there's scope for improving the warning system and maybe modelling to better predict flood effects based on rainfall. There's still a danger that it could lead to complacency and people ignoring warnings.. Which I think is a problem with the UK and overruse of 'Red' and 'Amber' alerts. Texas was very much a Red event, but how to communicate that to the public and public safety groups so alerts don't get ignored.

My family lives a few hundred miles away and there has been a large amount of rain in the Midwest this year and they have received a lot of flood warnings. The frequent warnings are probably not helping.

Additionally, I don't think people realize how fast water can rise from flash flooding. If a storm system dumps most of the water over a ridge it may go into another watershed and a river may never really rise, but if dumps most of the water in your watershed it can rise feet in the time it takes you to: notice the rise, find anyone who might be in danger, and finally move outside of the area affected. It also doesn't take that much water in the road to increase the buoyance of a vehicle, reducing its adherence to the road surface and be swept off the road into the river because the broad side of your vehicle (or just the tires) is/are a big 'sail' to the water. I grew up in rural farmland with low water crossings, as a general rule if you couldn't see the road surface and it is visible flowing you probably shouldn't ford a river. There may debris, scouring, road collapse hidden by the murkiness that is just as dangerous as the water itself.

Anyhow, the Trump administration's cutbacks to the NWS' budget are not helping. Don't mistake tweets as primary source for people's weather information. Where I grew up still doesn't have good broadband internet, mobile signals can be spotty, and radio stations are easily lost in the hills. One reliable source of weather information that could almost always depend on was the NWS weather radio network but that is no more. I recently turned on my weather radio to check it before camping and only one of the three were actually broadcasting now; not helpful if you are in an area with partial signal and that one station is the one not working.

Also, because of my job I am in regular contact with my local NWS office and they have warned because of personnel and budget cuts that warnings may be delayed and less accurate. While no person can point to a particular instance and say this is why so many people were injured or killed. Minor causes can have compounding effects that will lead to visible outcomes. I would expect a climb in property damage and casualties to continue.

To me, it is a combination of human behavior, ignorance, and a loss of public security good that we have had for nearly 60 years.

So, these government people can't manage to configure an FTP site for read-only?

I was an IT security consultant to UK government departments, agencies and their suppliers for over 20 years. Can someone please explain to me how sharing meteorological data affects cybersecurity? I honestly have no idea how atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction at various altitudes applies to this issue.

Answers from the Register's expert meteorologists and wizard computer hackers are politely requested.

(Edit "apples" -> "applies")

Commercial Security here ... I'm also questioning that reasoning.

Just _how_ bad do your servers need to be secured, so that the sharing of a result of a computation might be able _in_any_way_ to adversely affect the means of your computation?

The only scenario that would make such an effect possible at all is by connecting the supercomputers themselves to the public Internet to serve the results.

Only if that would be the case, just dropping the delivery of data might really improve your "cybersecurity"... however, in this case I would actually prefer, if they did it just to hurt science and climate research, as per usual Trump policy ...

Gee, pretty soon the forecast will resemble the typical Daily Express forecast.

[for international readers, they're the ones that tend to scream about "snowmageddon" and other unlikely calamities that never occur]

The last thing any of us need anywhere near a weather forecast is a system known for "hallucinating".

is a fanatical left wing conspiracy. There is no such thing as weather.

/s

Have they finally caught Elmo using their cluster to (badly) self drive taxis and does their cutting off of access mean we will see even more Tesli ramming into barriers and over pedestrians?

These questions and many others will be answered in the next episode of MAGA

Read this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehicle-suddenly-accelerated-with-our-baby-in-it-the-terrifying-truth-about-why-teslas-cars-keep-crashing

"Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches"

Just glad that when I wanted one I could not afford it.

I got confused. I thought you were talking about the little red guy and then realised you meant that Elmo.