According to a recent post on the Capital Weather Gang's blog, NOAA announced this afternoon that the assessment of how the National Weather Service (NWS) performed during the Hurricane Sandy event is back on, after being abruptly cancelled on November 15th. Here is an excerpt of NOAA's statement from the blog post:
One of the most promising aspects of the original service assessment team was that for the first time it would have heavily involved members of the private sector as well as social scientists and other experts - not just members of the same government agencies that were responsible for issuing watches and warnings during the event.
I call your attention to the last line of today's statement, which suggests that non-government participation will be sorely lacking in the new assessment:
How unfortunate.
To be clear, I was in no way involved with the assembly of the original assessment team (I have received e-mail inquiries regarding that possibility based on my response to the suspension of the original group). As a result, I harbor no "sour grapes" as to whether or not outside or private sector individuals should be involved in the process.
My frustration comes from being a meteorologist concerned with how public and commercial concerns react to an impending severe weather threat such as Sandy, and improving future forecast and warning products based on past experiences (including mistakes, which I clearly believe were made in this particular case). Until we involve key members of the media, emergency management, social media experts, social scientists and private sector individuals in the assessment of these major events, I feel that we will potentially continue to let the public and other end users down in these situations.
Putting my concerns aside, NOAA's decision to proceed with the assessment without the involvement of individuals from outside of the government appears to show a lack of concern with point 6 of U.S. Rep. Paul Broun's letter to the Administrator of the agency, issued on November 20th:
It certainly appears that Rep. Broun was concerned that the new assessment team would remain "independent", as was promised by the assembly of the first team. Unfortunately, it appears as though that won't be the case this time around.
I wonder what kind of response we can expect from Rep. Broun and his committee? Will they accept NOAA's actions or demand that some level of independence be restored to the "official" examination of this historic weather event?
For now anyway, it appears as though the fox will continue to guard the hen house when it comes to reviewing government performance during extreme weather events in the U.S.
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