NY Times article on the NWS
here.

Hurricanes like Matthew have laid bare the dirty secret of the
National Weather Service: its technologies and methods are woefully behind the
times.

At 11 o’clock on the night of Sept. 29, the National Hurricane Center in Miami
posted an updated prediction for Hurricane Matthew. Using the latest data from a
reconnaissance aircraft, the center’s computerized models led meteorologists
there to conclude, in a post on the center’s website, that “only a slight
strengthening is forecast during the next 12 to 24 hours.” Their prediction
proved to be astonishingly amiss: The following day, Matthew exploded from a
Category 1 into a Category 5 hurricane, with winds gusting to 160 miles per
hour, strong enough to flatten even the sturdiest homes.

It’s a situation that deeply troubles Cliff Mass, a meteorologist and professor
of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. As he does after every
major weather event, Mass deconstructed the bungled predictions for Matthew and
Patricia on his popular website, “Cliff
Mass Weather Blog,” which he started in 2008. He called Patricia a “poster
child, perhaps the worst case in a while, of a major problem for
meteorologists,” and in response to Matthew he posted a graph that showed how
the National Hurricane Center’s computer-forecasting model at one point was off
by more than 325 nautical miles in predicting the storm’s westward course.