After 47 Years, the National Weather Service's Daily TV Broadcast To Alaskans Will End (gizmodo.com) 74
"Alaska Weather," a daily 30-minute TV show that has broadcast across Alaska for the past 47 years, is going off the air due to a lack of funds. Gizmodo reports: In lieu of the news, residents seeking information on their state's weather will be forced to lean on spotty, sub-par internet. Friday evening will be the final television installment of "Alaska Weather," as first reported by Alaska Public Media. The show, which is the only weather program produced directly by the National Weather Service, has filled an information and communications void for decades. Without it, "if you don't have good internet connectivity, you're in a world of hurt in western and northern Alaska as far as getting weather information," said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center, to the Associated Press. And many in Alaska don't have reliable or fast internet access.
General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube. Emergency alerts, like storm warnings, will be relegated to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state, per Alaska Public Media. Officials from the state-owned, non-profit media organization say that money problems are to blame. Putting together and distributing "Alaska Weather" has cost Alaska Public Media $200,000 annually, and the network can't afford to do it anymore, according to Linda Wei, APM's chief content officer.
"It's no longer sustainable for us to continue in this manner," Wei told AP. "It's not a decision that we came to lightly." Big state funding cuts in 2019 left APM in a tough spot. The media org kept "Alaska Weather" going on its own for years, following the loss of state backing, but now Wei says the network can't anymore. "We've been doing this, without support, for about four or five years, and we've made that known to NOAA," said Wei to WaPo. "It just got to the point where we couldn't continue." Wei says she's hoping there's a possibility of getting "Alaska Weather" back on the air. But for now, there will be a gap.
General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube. Emergency alerts, like storm warnings, will be relegated to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state, per Alaska Public Media. Officials from the state-owned, non-profit media organization say that money problems are to blame. Putting together and distributing "Alaska Weather" has cost Alaska Public Media $200,000 annually, and the network can't afford to do it anymore, according to Linda Wei, APM's chief content officer.
"It's no longer sustainable for us to continue in this manner," Wei told AP. "It's not a decision that we came to lightly." Big state funding cuts in 2019 left APM in a tough spot. The media org kept "Alaska Weather" going on its own for years, following the loss of state backing, but now Wei says the network can't anymore. "We've been doing this, without support, for about four or five years, and we've made that known to NOAA," said Wei to WaPo. "It just got to the point where we couldn't continue." Wei says she's hoping there's a possibility of getting "Alaska Weather" back on the air. But for now, there will be a gap.
Weather in Alaska (Score:4, Funny)
Day 1: cold as fuck
Day 2: cold as fuck
Day 3: cold as fuck
Day 4: cold as fuck
Day 5: cold as fuck
Day 6: cold as fuck
Day 7: cold as fuck
Day 8: cold as fuck
Day 365: cold as fuck
Re:Weather in Alaska (Score:5, Interesting)
We joke about the ease of weather prognostication where it is hot all the time, too, yet we're grateful for it.
Fortuitously, meteorologists are still of some value given their ability to predict damaging climatic events, like weather that might spin the roofs off our homes, or pose a threat to our electrical grids.
Extreme climatic events are today less fearful because of their predictability, but they've always happened. There was a hurricane in Galveston 123 years ago that caught beachgoers sitting in chairs near the water when a wall of incoming water 15+ feet high probably created a bemused look on their faces, for a few seconds.
Longer than the Titan passengers got to ponder their great good luck, but not by much.
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We joke about the ease of weather prognostication ...
Your and parent post made me think of the movie Groundhog Day [wikipedia.org] and Phil (Bill Murray):
There is no way that this winter is ever going to end as long as this groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any other way out. He's got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.
You want a prediction about the weather? You're asking the wrong Phil. I'm going to give you a prediction about this winter? It's going to be cold, it's going to be dark and it's going to last you for the rest of your lives!
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Re:Weather in Alaska (Score:5, Informative)
Fairbanks right now is having high temperatures around 70F (21C), and lows in the mid-50s (~ 13C). Their record high is 88F (31C), according to teh intarwebs. Summer days are beautiful and wonderfully long (I've been in Alaska during the summer).
On the other hand, I remember a few years ago when it got so cold there that automobile tires basically broke. The record low there is -80F (-62C). So, yeah - it can get CAF.
Re: Weather in Alaska (Score:2)
Re: Weather in Alaska (Score:2)
Fairbanks here.
We got a two inch snow dump on 6/2.
We had a daily weather broadcast? I had no idea.
Re: Weather in Alaska (Score:2)
Add random days with blizzards.
The weather reports in Alaska are more important than weather reports in California.
Easy solution! (Score:2)
Shortwave can cover vast distances for relatively little money.
With an inexpensive RTL-SDR dongle you can receive shortwave signals with your PC. With a bit of software you can decode those signals and render the results appropriately.
So if there's something so damned important that all Alaskans need to access it... release an application, tell people to spend $20 on a USB device, and start your shortwave broadcast.
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Sad thing is Alaska is a red state. There are people don't know this but they voted for this. And yes it is important information sudden changes in weather can kill people in harsh climates like Alaska. This is part of a broader trend to make access
Re: Easy solution! (Score:1)
They could make the tourists pay for it. A tiny sales tax, less than a percent, in the tourist towns should easily cover it. If the locals bitch (they will) then allow for Alaskan residents to be exempt.
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They could make the tourists pay for it. A tiny sales tax, less than a percent, in the tourist towns should easily cover it. If the locals bitch (they will) then allow for Alaskan residents to be exempt.
Ah yes.. The tiny tax.. That always seems to grow.. First comes the hotel tax at some reasonable number like 1%... Pretty soon it's at 5%, then 10%... The solution to everything.. Tax MOAR!!.
Why not cut some funding for useless services? Why is the go-to always to tax people?
My own state continues to fund the emergency phones placed every few miles on state / county highways.. Because nearly everyone has a cell phone these days, and 911 service is available via ANY cell tower in range of your device,
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All public safety spending is like this. It's a lot of money put out in front, but when it's really needed, it's there.
$14,000 is cheap unless you value other people at nothing.
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Changing the speed limit to 20 miles an hour would be even more valuable to saving lives. Thank goodness "saving lives" is not the only metric we use.
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Generally you look at the best next marginal gain; you don't even consider doing X if you're not doing Y and Y is more cost effective. For example suppose the societal cost to reduce the speed limit to 20 on some stretch of road is a million dollars, but we can save the same number of lives by installing better lighting at 1/10 of a million, it makes no sense to consider the speed limit change until you've done the lighting change *and every other thing that is more cost effective*.
Understanding this makes
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If only one of the 1000 calls resulted in saving someone's life (and someone in a vehicle passing by wouldn't of reported it on their cell phone quickly), that would be $14,000,000 per life saved. I'm fairly certain that the 1 life saved for $14,000,000 is closer to reality than your math which assumes every one of the ~1,000 calls saved one life on the average.
$14,000,000 a year spent on more police to detect and drunk drivers would likely save more lives.
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1000 calls actually still seems significant for $14M in cost. There are more expensive services that see less use. What does it cost to implement and maintain an amber alert system? In Canada, in 2022, we had 15 amber alerts. In ALL of Canada.
https://www.canadasmissing.ca/... [canadasmissing.ca]
It's not easy to find, probably because it rolls up into a larger emergency alerting network, but if you allocated the costing to the amber alert category, the price per alert wouldn't be great.
Re: Easy solution! (Score:2)
The day a school bus gets stuck in a blizzard killing everyone on board someone might consider that a weather report might actually be a good idea.
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You keep trying to murder them (Score:2)
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One would hope that school districts operating school buses would maybe have some form of communication with the outside world other than a half-hour "receive only radio" broadcast once a day and wouldn't send out buses if that form of communication led them to believe that doing so was unsafe.
Suppose the bus just broke down in bad weather (this is Alaska) for reasons other than a blizzard. Surely there is some way for the driver to contact someone for help or the tracking of the bus will reveal it has stop
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...Yeah, it's probably a useful service. Yes, it sucks that there's no funding.. So, what? Raise taxes? Borrow? Print? What's your solution?
Considering damn near every resident in Alaska qualifies to be paid to live there out of a fund that has existed since 1982 (over $3000 a citizen in 2022), and this broadcast service has been going on for decades, maybe residents should ask WHY there's suddenly a lack of "funding"?
And yeah, I'd agree that you can be in a "world of hurt" in Alaska without good weather intel. However, residents have survived there for a damn long time without internet so to use "spotty internet service" as a threat to surviv
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"(source: lived in North Pole for years well before the WWW existed"
So you lived on an ice flow for years? There is no land mass at the "north pole"
Perhaps you meant north of the arctic circle?
Perhaps, just maybe, when he says lived "in" North Pole, he's referring to the city...North Pole, AK. Smart ass.
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True.
There's a big difference between living " at the North Pole" and " in North Pole [Alaska]" - with the latter being a long way from the former.
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I suspect the problem is that this is federally funded, and many are opposed to the feds using tax dollars for literally anything. Alaskans on the other hand have very long been reliant on broadcasting into remote areas, and despite being conservative were very much in favor of public broadcasting in general. So the state needs to step up and provide a replacement service.
The thing is, this service was inexpensive. It's also something that the commercial world won't touch because it's not a profit maker.
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If it was a blue state, there'd be more homeless. And they'd be blue.
Re:Easy solution! (Score:4, Informative)
For anyone who doesn't already know, the antenna makes a huge difference. The little telescoping things that those tend to come with are just about worthless for shortwave listening. A 100' sloper is easy to make and will dramatically improve your experience.
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Since Alaska is GOP and the GOP cut the funds and believe in "States Rights", how about the Alasaka State Gov pay for it ?
People in other states should not fund this. That is the GOP motto. Oh wait, I guess the GOP only wants to get the benefits and cut benefits for others. TFB Alaska, your GOP officials did this, live with it.
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The stupidity of this is that the cost of maintaining the broadcast is $0.50/year per Alaskan. Really, which is a better investment?
YouTube (Score:2)
General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube.
With all of the requisite advertisements [slashdot.org], of course. Just be thankful you don't want weather information in Canada [slashdot.org].
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In Canada we have Weather Radio in about 90% of the country. Which, given just how much of the country is uninhabited wilderness is actually pretty damn impressive.
The receiver costs less than CAD 100.
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We have something similar. NOAA weather radio [weather.gov]. Unfortunately, the coverage in Alaska sucks.*
*Why they went with a Television-based reporting system instead of radio, I can't figure. A couple of long-wave AM repeaters could probably cover the state.
no Internet (Score:2)
They have good TV reception, but not Internet?
How about XM Weather? That's what general aviation pilots use.
Re:no Internet (Score:5, Informative)
They have good TV reception, but not Internet?
if you read the summary, most of Alaska has subpar Internet. It is far cheaper and easier to broadcast a TV signal than to install Internet to everyone's home in Alaska.
How about XM Weather?
I am fairly certain that free TV weather reports cost less than XM weather. Many issues in life can be solved if you have enough money except for the part when people do not have enough money.
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They have good TV reception, but not Internet?
if you read the summary, most of Alaska has subpar Internet. It is far cheaper and easier to broadcast a TV signal than to install Internet to everyone's home in Alaska.
I am wondering about it from a technical point of view. TV signals do not propagate easily or very far. The places where you "can't get Internet" in Alaska seem like places you can't get TV, either.
Considering satellite Internet, then it would generally be the case that in Alaska it would be the other way around: very easy to get Internet, but impossible to get TV.
You don't have to have expensive Starlink or whatever, either. Just the same kind of dish I had in the 1990s that cost about $40/month. And for t
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I am wondering about it from a technical point of view. TV signals do not propagate easily or very far. The places where you "can't get Internet" in Alaska seem like places you can't get TV, either.
And why would you think that? A TV signal can reach 60 miles. What is the range of a 5G? maybe 3 miles. And wired internet to rural anywhere is known as the last mile problem. [techopedia.com]
It was not "free", really, since they were paying for it in taxes. . .
While taxes were ultimately paying for it, you do know that the Alaskan receiving the weather report did not have to pay a subscription to receive it, right? That is unlike XM.
All for a 30 minute show that's doing nothing more than reciting information already available (for free).
What part of most of Alaskan has subpar Internet is unclear to you? Yes the information could have been obtained free through the Internet but again Internet is
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At a former job, we helped independent (mostly rural) telephone and electric companies deliver Internet, and that included the companies that ran Internet on the North Slope and out to Adak. There's no ground connectivity, so it's satellite, and at that latitude, even that is not great. Most of the sats are focused on the lower latitudes - they don't want to spend their limited energy budget for a small number of people. So what Internet connectivity they do have is slow and heavily throttled.
Specifically,
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A quick search online says XM Weather is spotty at best in southeast Alaska, especially with a recent satellite retirement: https://www.trawlerforum.com/forums/s3/sirius-xm-southeast-alaska-63933.html [trawlerforum.com]. A poster got a coverage map from SiriusXM that excludes the rest of the state.
Apparently the state of Alaska sued SiriusXM in 2014 [alaska.gov] specifically for selling subscriptions to Alaska residents, knowing that they were too far north to get a reliable signal.
$200K (Score:5, Interesting)
Is what the articles say it cost annually to produce. Alaska has a population of 732K, so maybe .50c per year per person? The Alaska state budget this got cut from is $4.8B.
Either this really isn't as useful as it's made out to be and the majority of people didn't care based on how they vote or this is cynical "small government" showmanship and some real "leopards eating faces".
I'm leaning the latter as I've seen and heard the right wing attacks on public media my whole life.
Re:$200K (Score:5, Informative)
"Small Government" pays each Alaska resident a couple thousand a year. ~$2600 in 2022.
It would appear that in 2022 the PFD amount was $2,622 along with an additional $662 energy rebate making for a $3,284 total payout.
Perhaps the additional rebate was the downfall of this weather service, but I kind of doubt it.
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This assumes Republican voters actually quantify what the outcomes of "small government" policies are which in my opinion most do not. They just want to cut the things they don't like (or been told to not like, ie, public media) and fund the things they do like no matter the idealogical conflicts (like the state annual payout, military, police, etc)
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Vote them out today, for your survival folks.
*: Yes, I know what the doublespeak name for that department is. I call it for what it actually is and does.
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Is what the articles say it cost annually to produce. Alaska has a population of 732K, so maybe .50c per year per person? The Alaska state budget this got cut from is $4.8B.
Either this really isn't as useful as it's made out to be and the majority of people didn't care based on how they vote or this is cynical "small government" showmanship and some real "leopards eating faces".
I'm leaning the latter as I've seen and heard the right wing attacks on public media my whole life.
In 2022, Alaskan residents (as in almost all of them) qualified for a total of over $3200 to be paid to each resident one time per year out of a fund that has existed since 1982 (the PFD). This included an additional $662 energy rebate.
Perhaps funds were stripped away from this broadcast to pay out the additional energy rebate, but I'd more question why this service is suddenly stopping since the state clearly has funds. (The $3200 was considerably larger than normal)
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Could be the same kind of phenomenon that happens in a lot of states: the majority of the population - and so a lot of the political power - lives in cities, and either don't realize or don't care about services for the rural parts of their state (even as they romanticize the quiet small town life, farming, and "simpler times").
You can see this dynamic playing out in, say, Washington s
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Roughly half of Alaska's population lives in Anchorage which, even if they fancy themselves some hinky frontier town, is a modern city of ~300k, little different than a bunch of other cities along the Pacific coast.
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I think this is accurate but I feel that usually plays out with the populous cities voting in Democratic representatives and thus passing those laws, like in your examples Washington is a pretty solidly blue legislature and governor.
In this case Alaska, much like Texas, currently is pretty solidly Republican with an R governor and a majority R legislature so the rural folks are over-represented in comparison so the city dwellers (if we take the simplistic view of rural = R and city = D)
In this case I wonder
why can't they just lean over (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And get their news by reading "all the them" [google.com].
NOAA Radio (Score:5, Informative)
Alaska still has 52 NOAA radio broadcast stations covering the entire state. Those should provide all the same information (without the visuals of course), and is better because the forecasts are much more localized than a TV broadcast covering the entire massive state.
https://www.weather.gov/nwr/st... [weather.gov]
Here's an example TV broadcast from a few days ago. The YouTube video has 23 views at this time. It's very likely that the NWS and Alaska Public Media know the TV viewership was very, very low as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Someone should launch thousands of satellites (Score:3)
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Somebody misses their government funding (Score:2)
Why do you want to see television (or a video). If you want serious weather information, surely a nice web page with a couple of graphics is better? Fast access to dense information: temperatures, precipitation, wind. More: a simple web page doesn't require "good internet connectivity" - any old connection will do.
General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube.
Again, why video?
Emergency alerts...will be relegated to...radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state.
Television coverage is better than radio coverage? Sure...wanna buy a bridge?
Alaska now joins 14 other states that don’t fund public media.
Ah, we finally get to the real point. Should government fund public radio and/or television? Apparentl
You could always do the automated thing (Score:2)
They'll be fine (Score:2)