Today, WNIJ Host Jason Cregier and Illinois State Climatologist Dr. Trent Ford discuss what federal funding cuts to weather services could mean for dealing with climate change.
Ford says it’s a question worth posing and adds “there’s been a lot of back and forth and what federal policies are proposing.”
The challenge he says is figuring out where the federal government is going on the matter. Proposed cuts have included zeroing out a lot of the climate research the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration does.
Ford says a lot the research is focused on climate change, even as a lot it has nothing to do with climate change.
“Once we get out past the ten-to-fourteen-day period of weather forecasting," he said, "we shift from the weather time scale to the climate time scale.”
He says the modeling structure looks much different from, say, seven days, as opposed to 30 days.
Certain hazards operate differently on climate time scales than they do on weather time scales.
“Drought for example," Ford said, "in the spring and fall we discuss freeze, really heavy rainfalls and wildfire potential. When we’re talking, we call this time period the sub seasonal time period.”
Cuts to the National Weather Service may have the potential to reduce the capacity to make near term forecasts but may also reduce the capacity to communicate longer term hazards.
According to Ford, “Those models that we use to predict those hazards are only as good as the research that goes into them.”
For instance, Ford says that warning time being issued for tornadoes to the tornado affecting places has essentially doubled since the 1990s.
“You can imagine," he said, "how many countless lives that’s saved."
Ford closes the conversation by saying that without funding it makes it difficult to make advances in weather forecasting.
