Is the U.S. Weather Bureau a Fraud?
A Tacoma newspaper puts the national weather forecasting service to the test, finding that while local predictions often fail, the bureau struggles most in the capital itself.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Does Uncle Sam's weather bureau, costing $662,200 a year, make good? Is Bureau Chief Willis L. Moore a false prophet? The editor of the Times resolved to test the soundness of Emerson Hough's argument in Everybody's Magazine that the bureau is a bloated, bureaucratic mess that hasn't progressed in 20 years. The Times telegraphed editors in 33 cities, asking them to compare the weather bureau's forecast for Wednesday, April 28, with the actual conditions. The result was a 73 percent success rate for the bureau across the country. However, the failures were notable; in Washington D.C., where Chief Moore resides, the bureau missed its mark entirely, predicting showers while the day remained fair and cool. Critics point to the bureau's record of missing storms in Galveston and Omaha as proof that the service is in dire need of reform.
“It is cursed with politics. That it has progressed only in monopolizing and centralizing the service, in shrouding it in mystery; in defending it through expensive literature.”
Long before digital apps and hyper-local radar, newspapers were the primary gatekeepers of scientific data. This critique of Willis L. Moore mirrors modern debates about the efficacy of large, federally funded bureaucracies, even if the 'muckraking' style of early 20th-century journalism was far more aggressive than today's reporting.
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