text: And… even this is looking at things with too narrow a focus. Hazard mitigation – especially from tornadoes and related severe events – could be improved with not only better models, but with money allocated to better instrumentation. For example, the atmosphere’s vertical profile is, for the most part, only sampled twice a day at 400km horizontal resolution, which is absurd (yes, there are other inputs – radiometers and ACARS). NEXRAD radars cause a very high false positive rate (false tornado warnings) as a result of their sparseness and slow scan speed, and this high positive rate results in more death and injury as people ignore warnings (per study of Joplin survivors, and general observations of tornado alley behavior by many observers). So let’s redirect some money into instrumentation, too.
  The vast expenditure in climate modeling has produced little benefit other than careers for climatologists and a slowly improving, but still very weak understanding of climate. The bang for the buck just isn’t there – the spending is way out of proportion to the benefit. Pure science always has merit, but climate modeling has gotten disproportionately vastly greater funding, not for its scientific merit, but because of the dishonest politicization of the issue of global warming, errrr, climate change.