NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations. In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to …
But NOAA is Oceans and Atmosphere - nothing to do with weather.
For the last 20 years certain politicians have been campaigning to stop NOAA being allowed to publish weather reports. Instead they will licence the data to Fox and Acuweather etc who will sell the forecasts to the public.
But NOAA is Oceans and Atmosphere - nothing to do with weather.
Well it does run the US National Weather Service. But from the article-
...better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days.
It's rather hard to warn about things that aren't happening, and aren't predicted to happen. Well, some were predicted, but with the slow death of RCP8.5, those predictions are being falsified. Well, for science anyway. For climate 'science', the Chicken Littles are still screaming-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5dw4plzvlo
How the UK's extreme heat is shifting the conversation about air-con.
By two of the Bbc's climate extremists, who aren't climate scientists, but are easily fooled by people pretending to be. But a lot of people get fooled-
Across the UK, solid brick homes like theirs quietly absorb heat the way they have for decades. Charged‑up walls radiate warmth back into rooms that never get the chance to cool...
...Climate change is serious, he wrote, but "will not lead to humanity's demise". Governments, he added, should be investing in cooling for the countries that need it.
I wish the doom-ongers would make their minds up. First they tell us they want lotsa money to Insulate Britain. So
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/great-british-insulation-scheme-release-may-2026/summary-of-the-great-british-insulation-scheme-may-2026
The most common measure so far has been cavity wall insulation, accounting for 51,400 (37%) of the total 139,200 measures. This was followed by loft insulation which accounted for 39,500 measures (28%) and heating controls which accounted for 35,000 measures (25%)
The UK now has some better insulated homes. Rejoice! Except of course this creates problems during Summer. But such is politics.
Meanwhile, back in the US. Some of NOAA's excesses have been trimmed, and some aspects have been improved, ie their weather stations have been fixed following a citizen-lead inspection pointing out that many of those stations were improperly sited per WMO guidelines. The UK hasn't gotten to that point yet, despite most of the Met Office sites being junk. But NOAA still does science, eg an interesting paper I read some years ago about this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_wave
Rossby waves, also known as planetary waves, are a type of inertial wave naturally occurring in rotating fluids.
Which have a big impact on US weather (and OK, climate) what with the US having an ocean on either side and a couple of mountain ranges in the middle that perturb those waves and lead to things like America's Tornado Alley(s). Which is both FUN! and important. So Moore's Law means CFD can be done better at near-continental scale and tornados tend to be rather hazardous. Whether offloading this to Google will result in better or worse forecasting is anybodies guess. As will the financial impact.
"Except of course this creates problems during Summer. "
Oh Dear Jellied eel my shit stirring little propagandist.
Your own a site where people have more intelligence than your typical TikTok targets.
FACT: Insulating a house also helps stopping the cooler air getting out, whilst preventing heat getting in.
""Insulating homes has very little, if any, impact on the risk of overheating," said Professor Kevin Lomas from Loughborough University, who led the largest national study so far into overheating in homes.
Insulation can even help keep your home cool, because most types - certainly external wall and likely also cavity wall - will stop your home from getting as hot in the first place."
Source:
https://news.sky.com/story/is-insulation-making-your-house-hotter-in-summer-and-how-can-you-cool-it-down-12650742
Also see:
https://cat.org.uk/info-resources/free-information-service/eco-renovation/home-cooling/
Your own a site where people have more intelligence than your typical TikTok targets.
Err.. Is English your first language? Any idea why the Met Office would round up a temperature measurement to fake a record? Of course if you rely on getting your 'news' from a site barely above the level of TikTok, you wouldn't know this, the Bbc would just scream 'extreme weather!' and a new all-time (which is not very long in a climate sense) record. You wouldn't know the recorded reading was 37.7°C, not 38°C and because of the lousy choice of location, that should also be 37.7°C +/-5°C
I know this, because I don't rely on fake news and misinformation sites..
Yeah... nah.
"Tomorrow's weather will be like today's" is pretty decent as well. The problem is changes in weather, and thankfully Rossby did some great work for that (there were others before him, I forgot their names). How about questions like when does the weather change arrive? (like, when does the cold front hit with rain and thunderstorms), or how unstable in general is the atmosphere, will there be tunderstorms? Asupercell likely? Or, if the unpronouncable Icelandic volcano erupts, can we fly this or that route without the engines ingesting nasty stuff and failing over the Atlantic?
Getting a forecast for the next week is quite a bit more involved.
UK weather being pretty decent does depend where you are. In many parts of the country there has been no rain for weeks and continuous oppressive heat and hot nights, which is considered to be unpleasant weather for normal daily life.
Need some rain and need some more pleasant temperatures.
Google Cloud is more expensive than owning computers in every metric, unless you only plan to run jobs for less than a few months.
This is about money going out of the government and NOAA in particular and in to the direction of billionaires and megacorps. That's all. Nobody is really fooled by using buzzwords like "nimble".
Sounds great. Now your website information will only be accurate when you check it - an hour later, it will have changed so you'll have to go and check it again.
And I hope that NOAA remembers that "the cloud’s flexibility for providing large amounts of compute" may be "advantageous", but that flexibility will show up in the bills too.
Better get that checkbook ready.
Trump (moron) hates NASA and NOAA climate data that appears to show climate change - change that he says is a hoax (moron).
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260720-swiss-researchers-hoard-vast-trove-of-nasa-climate-data
I was expecting to see a Reg article on the Swiss frantically downloading this data before Trump had NASA and NOAA delete or hide it all.
Trump (moron) hates NASA and NOAA climate data that appears to show climate change - change that he says is a hoax (moron).
I'll just leave this here-
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/met-office-say-class-5-lingwood-meets-international-standards/
Lingwood’s original reading was 37.7C, meaning that the Met Office cannot legitimately claim the temperature in the surrounding area was more than 32.7C.
They then inexplicably tell us they have decided to round it up to 38C.
Temperature records manufactured in someone's back garden heat trap. The other mistake you, and many other people make is a lot of what you think of as 'climate data' aren't empirical observations, but manufactured inside climate models. Which is why I keep mentioning RCP8.5 because that's the source of most of the 'extreme climate' nonscience and being officially implausible, as now been withdrawn. So stuff generated based on RCP8.5 emission scenarios should also be withdrawn.
--- are one of my customers, albeit not for IT services and I've been up close and personal with numerous weather radars and the Crays that sit in Met Office HQ at Exeter.
Purely for additional information, my degree included thermodynamics. My Masters include time dependent dynamic modelling of heat transfer (and other systems).
It would be a major disappointment if Met Office went to cloud computing and when I was last on site there was talk of replacing their Crays.
Insulating homes improves both heat retention and heat exclusion as it reduces the overall heat transfer coefficient (U) in the equation Q=U * A (T1 - T2). Basic heat transfer stuff.
Another thing I can tell you from modelling large systems, they take a lot to start them moving and once moving are difficult to stop. One of my models included modelling large fuel and oil storage tanks where there is a phenomenon called rollover where the liquid in the bottom of the tank is hotter than the liquid at the top. They then swap positions usually with catastrophic effects.
You can google it yourself.
"Insulating homes improves both heat retention and heat exclusion as it reduces the overall heat transfer coefficient (U) in the equation Q=U * A (T1 - T2). Basic heat transfer stuff."
True, but in plenty of countries (possibly most of the Eurozone) the new energy building code prescribes good floor insulation. The soil under a 'typical' house tends to have a temperature that is quit a bit lower then the room temperature in summer. Go deep enough and you end up with 13°C. When you insulate that, you take away an important source of house cooling. Combine that with a contemporary tendancy to build in large windows to optimize light and views and you draw in plenty of heat that has a rather hard way to escape once the house is warmed up. So in practice, entire new urbanizations have houses that stay cool during the first part of a heat wave and gradually heat up to very uncomfortable temperatures. Then getting rid of that excess heat that came into these houses via the many large windows is hard to dispose of, even with (only partially, as completely blocking visible light renders a window useless) sun blocking glass. I live in one of such many urbanizations. And I know first hand experience how hot it can be in such a house during summer. I know people in other urbanizations who experience the same problem. You see aircos popping up everywhere and it's not merely as an energy efficient heatpump. People living in these newbuild houses buy them in droves after a heat wave, more then during or after a strong winter. The more eco-friendly solution is to buy and place screens in front (outside!) of the window but most people dislike the reduction in sunlight and views they get so they still go for the airco.
Insulation specs are driven by energy conservation so they aim to reduce heating requirements in winter. Nobody's thinking about reducing energy consumption for domestic aircon, only for large buildings.
I think a lot of houses are still built with a suspended floor and, from experience, they get cold af in winter, especially if you've got hard floors instead of carpet. They have to be vented, otherwise your floor rots, so the temperature under the floor follows the air temperature outside.
There is certainly a cluster coming down the road for NOAA, once the world envy for weather and climate prediction. But the "Cluster" that's coming isn't followed by "Toolkit" or "Director".
This is something that is designed and calculated to further hobble NOAA from the administrations climate-denying circle-jerk that begin by taking a chainsaw to the agency. This is how you destroy an agency, you kill off the institutional knowledge with indiscriminate firings and policies that lay waste to morale, and then you take its tools away so it is no longer self-reliant. What, the cloud contract expressly prevents running climate models, and the Cray is gone??
While we all complain about the $200 government hammer, the cost of the Cray that is going away will be a pittance compared to the cost of cloud compute once the hook is set and the prices start to rise. (unless, of course, the AI bubble bursts, then there may be a real argument for excess hyper-scaler compute being cost competitive)
This is something that is designed and calculated to further hobble NOAA from the administrations climate-denying circle-jerk that begin by taking a chainsaw to the agency. This is how you destroy an agency, you kill off the institutional knowledge with indiscriminate firings and policies that lay waste to morale, and then you take its tools away so it is no longer self-reliant.
That's Democrat view of the world. Spend, Spend, Spend! It's other people's money, but if that runs out, just print some more! Or course the DNC is pretty much broke at the moment ,and the mid-terms are coming up.
Alternatively, You look at how many agencies there are, and how much duplication exists. Do both NASA and NOAA need to have supercomputers to run Earth climate models, or perhaps NASA should focus on space, and NOAA on terrestrial matters? Then there's the EPA and all the other climate-pork that was swirling around. Plus a perk of being the President is every new administration gets to set policy. So Obama decide NASA should be navel-gazing and duplicate NOAA's work, Biden decided he'd prefer chocolate ice cream and left spending decisions to his auto-pen. Which gave Americans the ironically named 'Inflation Reduction Act' and billions in Green pork.
But then along comes the Trump and a desire to trim the fat off a lot of government pork. If you've been suckling on that pork, this is obviously bad news. Might not be able to go on as many all-expenses paid jollies to the COP shindigs and all the other climate cons. Budgets get trimmed, agencies are expected to be a lot more focused and efficient.
What, the cloud contract expressly prevents running climate models, and the Cray is gone??
That would just prove the point and Peter Principle. Cloud contract. Why would any highly paid genius-level NOAA exec agree to that, when elements of climate modelling are core business for NOAA? And yes, the supplier will probably try to screw them on costs, but again. Contracts. If it's a 5 or 10yr deal, it's business 101 to have some price/cost certainty over the duration of the contract. If NOAA execs running what are essentially multi-billion dollar businesses don't understand this, then they shouldn't be in the job and should go work for the DNC instead.
Instead of owning an asset which devalues with time, and can be sold after it is eventually upgraded. This solution is to own nothing, and pay more.
Of course the companies that are given the money have a long history of paying minimal taxes. Maybe as part of the contract link the unit compute price to a capped fraction of actual corporate taxes paid.
