On May 23, 2013 the Subcommittee on Energy of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee held a hearing on Restoring U.S. Leadership in Weather Forecasting. With witness testimony from Mr. Barry Myers, Chief Executive Officer of AccuWeather, a private weather forecasting company, and Mr. Jon Kirchner, President of GeoOptics, a private environmental data company, the hearing focused on how to improve budgeting and cooperation between federal weather organizations and the private weather industry.

Questions from members of Congress focused both on the overall impact of weather forecasting and the relationship between weather forecasting and climate change. Randy Weber (R-TX) and Chairman Stewart both inquired as to what the goals of storms forecasting were and what was the degree of predictability of a storm? Mr. Myers responded by saying that the goal of storm forecasting was to “provide time for getting away from tornadoes” and that some storms were more predictable than others, but that predictability is always getting better. Mr. Kirchner followed up this point by saying that we can now predict storms “precious hours” earlier than before and that we can now see storms that were invisible in the past.

Ultimately, because representatives from NOAA were not present, the subcommittee called for another hearing at a later date with further witness testimony.