DISCLAIMER: Opinions in this article are personal observations only and do not represent the opinions of AccuWeather, Inc. (You know it's gonna be a good blog entry when it starts out like that!)

We talked a few weeks ago about how the new director of The NHC [JessePedia], Bill Proenza, was busting on NOAA leadership about wasting money on frivolous celebrations while hurricane research and operations were suffering. Well, this guy just won't be quiet and after taking a tongue-lashing from his bosses, he's back at the pulpit, saying now they are trying to set him up to be fired and making public a memo from his bosses [PDF]. I admire his spirit, but who hired this guy? Was he all calm and nice in the interview or did they know what they were getting into?

Ah, memories, the D.O.C. memo template. Hasn't changed since I worked there (NCDC) in 1993.

The phone call he got, involving organizational-name dropping such as "The White House" was even juicer but can't be reprinted here because of our children's young ears (but check the bottom of the Miami Herald article). It's amazing to me that people think in this day and age that these kinds of things won't make it from government buildings out into the public. I mean, Proenza doesn't even have a blog!

One thing they didn't mention in the Miami Herald article was this paragraph-o-chastising in the NOAA letter:

Now, this might seem on the outside like a really amusing bone-headed move from the new boss who doesn't understand how things work in the trenches. But really it exposes a weakness in their alerting system -- shouldn't the system know better than to pick out the word Hurricane from the title of the product? Shouldn't it instead be keying off the content area of the product itself, or even better, a special code within the product?

Another topic of contention has been the QuikScat satellite, which has been mentioned in such as this one which reads, in part:

Now, I won't pretend that I have any clue what's going on in daily NHC operations, but QuikScat has always struck me as a nice research tool for NASA but does NHC really have time to look at research satellites in their daily operations? After doing some quick research on Google, I have found evidence that they have quoted QuikScat in some of their tropical statements but I can't believe it's one of their top drivers for forecasting decisions.

THIS MORNING'S QUIKSCAT MAP

In addition, I won't pretend to understand how a scatterometer on a satellite works, but the images on their website appear to be missing large portions of the tropics (see above) and it's not clear how often each point on Earth is "seen" but one of about two dozen official pages on QuikScat stated that the satellite "covers 90% of the Earth in one day." To me, that doesn't sound like something you should depend on to tweak a hurricane forecast, but perhaps someone who is more familiar with QuikScat and NHC operations can correct me on this.

Plus, the disclaimers are a dime a dozen on one of the many QuickScat data sites:

* Those would be the hurricanes the instrument is supposedly so good at observing.
** NHC may have other ways besides the website of accessing QuikScat data.

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