Yes, I wrote this diary a year ago. But it's time again, based on some information from the Miami Herald.
The National Hurricane Center has been a mainstay of hurricane forecasting and research for decades. It aptly is located in Miami, Florida. It's my understanding that you can take tours there. I always wanted to as a kid, and I have relatives that lived not too far from their old location on Old Dixie Highway in Coral Gables but alas, we never made it (they, as native South Floridians, could not understand why any sane child would be fascinated by hurricanes, of which they had gone through dozens.)
So I read this in today's open thread. And then I read the article.
Bill Proenza, who took the hurricane center post in January, said top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are spending $4 million on a ''bogus'' 200-year NOAA anniversary celebration.
That celebration is part of a broader campaign to publicize NOAA and its leaders, Proenza and other critics said, while diminishing the identity of its best-known components, the National Weather Service and the hurricane center.
Meanwhile, Proenza said, NOAA has cut $700,000 from a crucial hurricane research program and allowed other important initiatives to go unfunded, but it wants to spend money to change the widely recognized center's name to the ``NOAA Hurricane Center.''
The emphasis is mine. Like, what the fuck?! Especially when the atmosphere is giving signs it may want to repeat the insanity that was the 2005 Hurricane Season! Un. Real.
It gets worse.
NOAA officials in Washington rejected the criticisms, saying the anniversary campaign is costing $1.5 million over two years and helps explain their mission to the public.
Anson Franklin, NOAA's director of communications, also said the agency has no intention of destroying the National Weather Service, though it does intend to bring it, the hurricane center and similar agencies more firmly under the NOAA ``corporate identity.''
Newsflash, NOAA. You're a government agency. Not a freking corporation.
Oh but there's more.
In addition, NOAA has proposed changing the National Weather Service to the NOAA Weather Service, the National Ocean Service to the NOAA Ocean Service and so on.
Other documents and an obscure NOAA website -- www.weather.gov/banners/nws.php -- indicate NOAA wants to use its logo in place of the National Weather Service logo atop virtually all federal weather-related websites.
The effort to deemphasize the weather service's identity has been in the works for a while, Proenza and others said, and intensified just after Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the upper Gulf Coast in 2005.
As forecasters struggled to cope with the storm and its aftermath, NOAA headquarters ordered them to delete the weather service's logo from tracking maps that were being viewed by millions of people.
Mayfield, then in charge of the hurricane center, and Proenza, then in charge of the weather service's Southern district, which includes the stricken Gulf Coast areas, refused to comply.
''Our people still had no power and no days off,'' said Mayfield, who retired in January and now works for WPLG-ABC 10. ``I pushed back and said I wasn't going to do that. That was one battle I felt I had won.''
But those efforts are under way again, Proenza said, and will gain momentum if NOAA diminishes or eradicates the weather service's presence on the Internet.
Hear, hear to Max Mayfield. He was always a good guy, and I always liked seeing him on TV during hurricane season. But it's insane that during Katrina, they wanted to change the logos. Petty. Absolutely petty.
Now this is not a dig at the employees of NOAA, well not most of them. As a fellow government employee I, too get the brunt of the public's jabs about things that are beyond the realm of my responsibility or things I know absolutely nothing about, as if I personally control what goes down at the agency. I do not mean to do that to NOAA employees and if I come off like that I apologize profusely. And in addition, if there were a federal government agency that I'd love to work for, it's definately NOAA (or the USGS, another cool agency that I bet Bush would love to kill). This instead has all the stink of upper management appointed by the Bush Administration, who really hate America and want to drown the Federal Government in a bathtub. Oh wait, they already started with New Orleans.
NOAA has lots of contact pages. I'd recommend using this one to get through to Public Affairs.