New NOAA commercial fishing regulations established last year are destroying small family-owned businesses.
At House hearings this week the head of NOAA was attacked for ignoring Congressional law in setting up a National Climate Service.
One big sticking point for legislators is language in this spring’s final 2011 spending bill that averted a government shutdown, which states that “none of the funds made available by this division may be used to implement, establish, or create a NOAA Climate Service.” Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said the appointment of Karl and the hiring of six regional directors appear to have ignored those instructions. He quipped that NOAA was “living in climate sin,” a reference to Karl’s statement during an interview in December 2010 with ClimateWire that “we’ve moved in, … we’re waiting for the marriage certificate, but we’re acting like we have a climate service.”
Lubchenco defended her actions, saying that her appointments were “smart” and merely “good planning.” She said their salaries are drawn from “existing funds” and that legislation dating back to the National Climate Program Act of 1978 describes providing climate services as part of NOAA’s mission. She responded to Hall’s concerns that the climate service would take away from NOAA’s other activities by saying, “It’s good government to reorganize periodically.” She also referred to its economic potential, citing the $1 billion industry that has emerged around the National Weather Service.
Speaking with ScienceInsider after the hearing, she made it clear that NOAA intends to push ahead. “This is an idea whose time has come.” [emphasis mine]
In other words, so what the law forbids NOAA from doing this. We know best, Congress can go to hell.
NOAA today announced its prediction for 2011, calling for an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season.
The monthly updated graph for April of the Sun’s solar cycle sunspot activity was posted yesterday by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. You can see it below.
Though the Sun remained active, you can see that the steep increase in sunspot activity that occurred in March has ceased. At the moment it looks as if the Sun’s sunspot activity is following the most recent scientific prediction, more or less exactly, though the small dip in April puts the numbers slightly below that prediction.
All in all, we still appear to be headed to the weakest solar maximum in two hundred years.
The pig squeals at NOAA: The agency’s administrator told Congress yesterday that the 2011 budget deal will cause great harm to weather monitoring.
Note that NOAA is getting $4.5 billion in the 2011 budget, $700 million more than the weather agency got in 2008.
Only in Washington is a budget increase of almost 20 percent in three years called a draconian cut.
After literally years of inactivity, well below all initial predictions, the Sun truly came to life this past month. Below is the March monthly update of the Sun’s sunspot cycle, published by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. The red curve is the prediction, while the dotted black line shows the actual activity.
As you can see, the Sun’s sunspot activity shot up precipitously. Though I don’t have the data from past years, the March jump appears to me to probably be one of the fastest monthly rises ever recorded.
Does this mean the newest prediction from the solar scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center calling for a weak solar maximum in 2013 is wrong? Probably not, though of course in this young field who knows? I would say, however, that the overall trend of the data still suggests the next maximum will be very weak.
Stay tuned! The next few months should finally give us a sense of where the next maximum is heading.
It ain’t just NASA that’s having budget problems: The lack of a budget from Congress is going to delay the launch of two civilian NOAA weather satellites by more than a year.
