NWS FY 02 Appropriation Clears House: Next Stop, The Senate

On July 18, 2001, the full House of Representatives approved the FY 02 House Appropriation Bill (HR 2500) for Commerce, Justice, State, and Related Agencies (CJS). The bill received overwhelming support from House members, receiving over 400 "yes" votes in the final tally. Ranking Minority Member Jose Serano and Chairman Frank Wolf crafted a bi-partisan bill that addressed controversial issues at the subcommittee level to avoid lengthy debates on the House floor. The Committee leadership stated certain programs were not fully funded because the Senate would fund the program and the two sides would resolve the differences at Conference.

"We hope this is the case for the cuts to NWS Alaska Buoys and WFO Construction and OAR's Tsunami Hazard Mitigation," said Steve Gallagher, Director of Budget Planning for the NWS. Gallagher added that bi-partisan support for this bill in the House is good news for NOAA and the NWS. In recent years, the CJS bill has passed the House by narrow margins and included controversial amendments that delayed final passage. Barring a holdup in the Senate, this is expected to speed up final passage of the NWS appropriation for FY 02.

The House Bill provides $729 million for the NWS, an increase of $36.2 million over the FY 01 appropriation, and $1.4 million over the FY 02 President's Request. The House Bill approved the NWS earmarks from the Subcommittee markup, including the Huntsville WFO, relocation of the Kessler NEXRAD, and NWR transmitters for Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Links for more information:

• Previous NOAA's NWS Focus budget article http://www.nws.noaa.gov/com/fs041301.htm#Budget
• NWS Budget Formulation website http://www.nws.noaa.gov/cfo/htmls/budget/budget_formulation_present.htm

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Update: Applications Due to USDA for NWR Transmitter Grants

Time is short for grant applications from rural areas to help place NOAA Weather Radio transmitters in rural areas not covered or poorly covered at this time. To date, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Rural Utilities Service has received about 30 applications, from across the country, for more than $2 million of the available $5 million in grant money contained in the FY 01 USDA budget to facilitate the expansion of NOAA Weather Radio system coverage.

The grant program will provide funds, on an expedited basis, for use in rural areas and communities of 50,000 or less. Grant funds are available immediately and applications will be processed on a first-come, first-serve basis until the appropriation is completely exhausted.

Applications for grants should be submitted by August 30th to ensure that they are received and processed before the end of September.

If you have questions concerning this program, call Craig Wulf, USDA, at 202-720-8427 or Orren E. Cameron, USDA, at 202-690-4493. Details of the grant program, as posted in the Federal Register, are available at http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/publications/weather%20radio%20nofa.htm.

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NOAA and NASA have formed a "virtual" center aimed at combining the strengths of both organizations to advance the use of satellite resources for improving numerical weather prediction. The majority of the work performed by the new Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) will be distributed geographically and organizationally among NOAA and NASA components.

According to Stephen J. Lord of NCEP's Environmental Modeling Center, JCSDA efforts will focus on improving the use of satellite data in current operational and research weather forecast systems, and preparing for new instruments to be launched later this decade. Initial activities will concentrate on setting up the infrastructure for the center, including developing and maintaining computer codes, establishing system databases, and developing software which will be shared among the satellite data assimilation community. Formal activities of the center have begun with multi-agency budget support using FY 01 funds. Initial support for the center comes from NWS, NESDIS, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the NOAA OAR Office of Weather and Air Quality Research.

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At the half-year mark, the NOAA home page continues to be one of the most popular and most visited federal government Web sites, especially during severe weather events across the USA, according to Greg Hernandez, online editor and webmaster for the NOAA home page.

From January through June 2001, the NOAA home page received more than 92.4 million hits. This averages out to more than 529,000 hits per day. Most of the visits come from the dot-com world, 60 percent. The dot-net domain accounts for 20 percent of the visits, and dot-gov accounts for a little over seven percent of the NOAA home page traffic. By year's end, the NOAA home page could top the 200 million mark.

"The news items on the NOAA home page are the key ingredients which continue to bring people to the page each day," said Hernandez. He added that the most popular page continues to be the weather page. In each of the past six months, the weather page remained solidly in first place. "There's no doubt that when weather happens across the USA the NOAA home page is the place where people come to find out the latest."

The top five pages during this six-month period are as follow:

• Weather Page: http://www.noaa.gov/wx.html
• Site Map: http://www.noaa.gov/sitemap.html
• Satellites: http://www.noaa.gov/satellites.html
• Charts: http://www.noaa.gov/charts.html
• Ocean: http://www.noaa.gov/ocean.html

The NOAA home page received accolades from the Boston Globe calling it "an addictive site." USA Today Online selected "NOAA's Drought Information Center" as the "Hot Pick" of the day on Tuesday, June 12, 2001. Nielsen NetRatings rated the NOAA home page number one during the week of June 18, 2001. It was number two the previous week.

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900 Visitors Tour New York Forecast Office

The NWS Forecast Office in Upton, NY, was the featured facility of Brookhaven National Laboratory's Summer Sunday Tours on July 22, 2001. More than 900 people attended a 45-minute tour of the facility that featured an outdoor show-and-tell of observation systems, a conference room briefing on NWS operations, an operations room briefing covering technologies used in forecasting, and an outdoor briefing that promoted hurricane and thunderstorm awareness and safety. The highlight of the day was a 1:30 p.m. radiosonde launch, which was witnessed by up to 500 people as the song "Up Up and Away" (by The Fifth Dimension) played. Nine NWS staff and two volunteers teamed to make this a highly successful and entertaining community outreach activity.

A virtual tour of the Upton office is available on the WFO Upton web site at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/er/okx/tour/welcome.html. The BergenSkywarn website also posted photos of the event on their site.

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Anniversary: Kansas River Flood Set Records in 1951

This July marks the 50th anniversary of the great Kansas River flood of 1951 which killed 28 people and caused thousands to abandon their homes, schools, and businesses. In all, the flood was estimated to have caused $935 million in damages and to have displaced half a million people from their homes in 150-200 cities and towns.

Additional information on the flood and its many impacts can be found on the Central Region home page, including details on local impacts of the 1951 flood and current flood forecasting practices, may be found on the web pages of the Missouri Basin River Forecast Center and the NWS Forecast Office in Topeka, KS.

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On the Web: New Outreach Tools Available

• The NWS Eastern Region Hydrologic Services Division, in cooperation with the Southeast River Forecast Center, has produced a "Tropical Cyclones and Inland Flooding" awareness guide, available at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/er/hq/flooding/brochure.htm. The Guide provides a historical perspective of the major tropical cyclone-associated inland flooding events, as well as NWS definitions, and information on what preparedness steps individuals and communities can take to keep themselves safe.
• The NWS Communications Office has posted an updated version of the general NWS briefing package, affectionately known internally as the "NWS 101" briefing. This is a 12-slide presentation for a general public audience that answers the "Who we are and what we do" questions. It can be downloaded in Corel Presentations, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Adobe PDF file formats. Local offices can download the format of their choice for customization. See the Communications Office "Tools" page at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/com/tools.htm

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