2019 Hurricane Season

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by AndyEss

... I don't think we can give NASA kudos for GPS.

No, that was another government agency, the Department of Defense (DOD).
Certainly not for cellular telephony, where credit should go to Bell Labs, AT&T, and Motorola .

[jimbunyard]

Well...ultimate 'credit' I suppose should go to the taxpayer for funding the development, but NASA certainly played an important role.

For example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0ggqY7vnAw

So how's that for MTDIRT (maximum thread drift in record time)?

[AndyEss]

GPS is and was all due to the US taxpayer. There still are no user fees (thank whomever you like and I hope I don't give some bureaucrat some ideas).
GPS is DOD and I supposed we can thank them (and DOE) for some of our good 21st century technologies.
And I agree that NASA and earth research satellites have made weather prediction quite excellent over the short term. We're even beginning to figure out some weather patterns on Mars now - including on what might have happened with the Martian oceans.

I wonder if the upcoming Flat Earth Society cruise to the edge of the world will really on GPS navigation?

[GordMay]

The LVDCs (Launch Vehicle Digital Computer, Saturn V) were designed and built by the IBM Corporation, for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.
➥ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhi...ce_saturn.html

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by GordMay

No, that was another government agency, the Department of Defense (DOD).
Certainly not for cellular telephony, where credit should go to Bell Labs, AT&T, and Motorola .

What made Cell phones and medical imaging possible was the development of being able to receive and transmit to tiny transmitters, millions of miles away.
So no, NASA didn’t develop cell phones, but did develop the technology that made them possible.

Or one could argue that they didn’t do it, they contracted that out, but it wouldn’t have happened without NASA.

[GordMay]

Truly, the US Space Program (NASA) has been a tremendous breeder of modern technology, but ...

Well we might just as well credit William Shockley et al for their 1947 invention of the First Transistor, at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
Or, perhaps, we could credit Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) for his 1959 invention of the integrated circuit. Or Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) for his improved silicon chip, later that year.
Maybe Benjamin Franklin, for his 1751 Book, “Experiments and Observations on Electricity”

NASA's hardly in that direct line.

[a64pilot]

Keep trying Gord.

[cyan]

I think we all have anecdotes for the accuracy of modern weather forecasting, but does anyone actually have data? It would be interesting to be able to judge, say, the historical accuracy of the different models available in something like Predict Wind. It would also be very easy to do... simply write some code that compares day-of GRIBs with the forecast ones from each previous day. The metrics could score location accuracy of systems, or more simply just compare wind vectors for basic but interesting rating.

I have to believe someone has already done it, and I just can't find it?
(and yes, I'm too busy writing code for something else right now)

[GordMay]

GPS History, according to NASA.
➥ https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/he...S_History.html

[a64pilot]

Gord, for some reason you just don’t want to give NASA it’s due.
Normal cause for rapid development of technologies is War, NASA did very similar, but thankfully didn’t require that millions had to die for us to get our luxuries.
But for your GPS example, without a space agency, it wouldn’t have been conceptualized, nor would the space vehicles exist, been hard to throw them up there without a launch platform, and finally I guess they would have to have been nuclear powered, because I believe Solar power is one of those things developed by or for the space program.
Some, but no means all of our modern conveniences and necessities that NASA is responsible for, directly or indirectly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA...f_technologies

I thank NASA every day for my Solar panels, because of course cruising is possible without them, but they are nice to have

[Checkswrecks]

Originally Posted by cyan

I think we all have anecdotes for the accuracy of modern weather forecasting, but does anyone actually have data? It would be interesting to be able to judge, say, the historical accuracy of the different models available in something like Predict Wind. It would also be very easy to do... simply write some code that compares day-of GRIBs with the forecast ones from each previous day. The metrics could score location accuracy of systems, or more simply just compare wind vectors for basic but interesting rating.

I have to believe someone has already done it, and I just can't find it?
(and yes, I'm too busy writing code for something else right now)

The meteorologists I work with like to point out that their accuracy is nearly 100%. Truly remarkable.

Of course, everything they forecast is for an accident that already took place.