Gongol.com Archives: March 2025
March 21, 2025
Once a person begins to grasp that wind is just air trying to equalize its pressure on a colossal scale, a lot of other weather phenomena make a great deal more sense.
The airliner that flipped over at Toronto Pearson in February had warnings about a high rate of descent just a second or two before touchdown, according to the preliminary report of the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. This fact, as well as the damage to the right main landing gear, will undoubtedly feature centrally in the mainstream news coverage of the incident. ■ "The pilot landed the plane too hard" is a convenient and attractive summary of the situation, but people need to digest the incident thoughtfully. Something can be both true and dangerously misleading if it overshadows facts that need to be examined in the daylight. ■ Fixating on "pilot error" -- whether it's actually the case or not -- is a really hazardous way to operate, since it causes us to miss the systemic factors undoubtedly involved. Those are the most important details involved. ■ Whenever something goes wrong within a complex system, "the human at the controls" is almost always a contributing factor, but the system itself that produced the result is what should get the most attention. The system includes training, guidance, rules, technology, and a whole range of other factors that matter. What makes for an attention-grabbing headline can easily obscure the story that demands to be told.
The National Weather Service has been placed under drastic personnel cuts by the Executive Branch, and the elimination of more than a thousand jobs is showing up in service reductions. ■ The Omaha office has suspended weather balloon flights due to the cuts. That may not seem significant at first, but small gaps in knowledge can have amplified consequences. ■ Omaha is the only close balloon site typically found upwind of most of Iowa, which means that the information captured by those radiosonde observations will no longer be available for forecasting purposes over the state. ■ That means no proximate upper-air data on pressure, temperature, winds, and humidity -- all of which can tell meteorologists a lot about the potential for conditions ranging from the ordinary to the severe. It's a significant loss of useful information.
