“I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says James Spann, an Alabama meteorologist. He says how he’s been “inundated” with eerie messages telling him to “stop lying about the government controlling the weather or else.”
They out here threatening the weathermen.
I used to work for the US government doing weather stuff and this is nothing new. Back at the end of the 2000s there was a lot of people who were reacting to the end of the bush administration (where “global warming” and “climate change” were banned terms) by deciding to go all Truther on WEATHER. Anything we were doing was suspect. We had 20,000 weather stations across the country but they could all be ignored because of pictures of one of them being badly installed in Arizona (it was in a parking lot: a heat island!).
I had a coworker that had to spend a few weeks rewriting his code because when he’d first done it, it was
too accurate. The precious calculations had been done in the 80s with FORTRAN, so when he converted the algorithm to Java, it took use of our new CPUs and now the averages were slightly different because the previous code had been very limited in how it did math. Naturally, as soon as we published new and improved calculations, endless fools claimed it was lies because the better rounding meant that it was now reported as 70.2 degrees in Newport in August 1987, not 70.1 degrees.
So he had to spend WEEKS rewriting all the calculations to use FORTRAN-equivalent math. Truncate everything, never round up or down, don’t store more than 2 decimal points ever.
We had armed guards on the building, and not just because the IRS was there too. They had their own separate set of armed guards.
Weather has always been stupidly, stupidly political.
