NOAA Weather will delete websites using Amazon, Google cloud services Saturday

1. The federal government has already invested hundred of millions of dollars and millions of person years of scientific effort to collect all the valuable data that NOAA, CDC, NIH, the National Weather Service, etc. have collected, curated, and analyzed

2. The DOGE-ies and their ilk are flushing that all down the toilet -- all your investment will now be lost, or at least inaccessible to you or anyone else who might do something useful with it.

> The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

> Break Up NOAA. The single biggest Department of Commerce agency outside of decennial census years is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, and other components. NOAA garners $6.5 billion of the department's $12 billion annual operational budget and accounts for more than half of the department's personnel in non-decadal Census years (2021 figures).

> This industry's mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable. That is not to say NOAA is useless, but its current organization corrupts its useful func-tions. It should be broken up and downsized.

> NOAA today boasts that it is a provider of environmental information services, a provider of environmental stewardship services, and a leader in applied scientific research. Each of these functions could be provided commercially, likely at lower cost and higher quality.

> Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather.

> Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS.

> The NWS provides data the private companies use and should focus on its data-gathering services. Because private companies rely on these data, the NWS should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.

It's an absolute death cult.

https://registry.opendata.aws/noaa-nexrad/

>The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency is poised to eliminate most websites tied to its research division under plans for the cancellation of a cloud web services contract, a move that could snarl operations at several labs.

If Bloomberg is correct, it seems that the contract was cancelled prior to developing (and testing and announcing to the public etc.) any replacement.

>A contract for the services across NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research — known as NOAA Research — has been targeted for “early termination,” according to internal documents seen by Bloomberg News. As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view.

Many Americans rely upon NOAA Research communications, both businesses and individual citizens. This worries me, not because I think that Trump is a fascist or because of my political views, but rather, because it suggests a lack of competent government leadership. NOAA Research is still doing its work, but we won't be able to access it anymore? I'm not a Bloomberg subscriber, so what I quoted was all I could read about it. I hope there's more info, e.g. about what the replacement delivery system to the public, will be...

If you run their archiving appliance right now, it just archives stuff from the game Roblox.

The less you track climate change, the less pressure there is to do anything about climate change.

@nikrdc, if this is you, why are you doing something so destructive and stupid?

Why is the country being destroyed like this?

It will cost ten times more than it saves, it's just chaos on purpose

NOAA uses cloud providers including AWS and GCP to host a bunch of services and sites under its "research division". The contracts under which these hosting arrangements are provided are to be terminated shortly. At that point those services and web sites will go offline.

afaics it's nothing to do with the actual weather service data feeds.

If they were paying reasonable, open-market rates to Amazon and Google, this could be a tragedy.

If they were getting fucked, it could be a reasonable response to sloth and indifference on the part of our civil service.

Has anyone bothered to check, or is this all just wailing and gnashing along party lines?