The Weather Machine Quotes

“It is through single points that we understand the whole.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“The weather machine is a last bastion of international cooperation. It produces some of the only news that isn’t corrupted by commerce, by advertising, by bias or fake-ness. It is one of the technological wonders of the world. At the beginning of an era when the planet will be wracked by storms, droughts and floods that will threaten if not shred the global order, the existence of the weather machine is some consolation.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“The glaring exception to that custom was the United States, even before the Trump-era retreat from the international community. The National Weather Service sent not its director but its deputy director, a gesture universally understood as a slight to the weather community as a whole. To compensate, or maybe rather to reiterate the arrogance of the gesture, the United States contributes 20 percent of the WMO’s budget, double the next largest member (Japan) and three times the amount from G7 states like France and Germany. (The formula is determined in parallel with funding to the United Nations as a whole.)”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“When the Weather Company sells its global forecasts to Facebook, and Facebook is a nation’s major source of news, where does that leave the nation’s weather service?”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“(They were also prohibited from using government funds for catering, even at meetings—so, no lunch.)”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“The complexity was again staggering. There seemed to be this endless list of challenges in building the models: better observations, more observations, better use of observations, more efficient use, better calibration, higher resolution, higher accuracy, faster computers, or more frequent outputs. There was never one thing to tweak. Every time I thought I might have a handle on how things worked, I would hear about another layer.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast

“2015, ECMWF’s scientists had squeezed out another day from the future, which meant the six-day forecast was now as good as the two-day forecast in 1975. Then they moved the goalposts: By 2025, ECMWF wants to have a model capable of predicting high-impact events two weeks ahead. (It predicted Sandy eight days ahead.) This is the truly remarkable thing about the place: not merely that ECMWF had the best global weather model in the world but that it had been constantly improved, for forty straight years.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast