They were putting forth reports that unfortunately interfered with that warning process,” Wetter said. “Falsified reports were submitted through our network to the National Weather Service. John Wetter, president of the Spotter Network, a group devoted to getting storm chaser and spotter information to NWS offices, said after he learned the user-submitted information via his network, his non-profit immediately launched an investigation. On April 11, a person whose IP address pinged to Cleveland, Ohio, submitted storms reports for tornadoes that were happening more than 800 miles away in Arkansas. Past tornado warnings that were issued in northeastern Arkansas on April 15. Schott forwarded information surrounding the incident to the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General and said the case continues to be actively investigated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.įast-forward a couple of weeks later, and it is the NWS office in Little Rock that is looking at two cases where public information was wrong and possibly nefarious. “It was an unbelievable lack of judgment because someone was just really curious to see tornado damage,” Ben Schott, meteorologist in charge of the NWS office in New Orleans, said. The man told at least one media organization that the tornado that moved through southeast Louisiana could have been an EF-4, and that information was shared throughout social media. In March, the National Weather Service office in New Orleans says they had to combat the spread of misinformation relayed by one of their former employees, who apparently took it upon himself to rate the damage of the destructive tornado that moved through the eastern part of the city. Over the last month, there have been at least two cases of inaccurate information being relayed to the public, an act that meteorologists say harms efforts on educating the public and building trust. The active severe weather season means an increase in storm reports that National Weather Service meteorologists are tasked with combing through to determine the severity of a storm, but sometimes the information in the reports are nothing more than fallacies. How the end of gravity would mean the end of the world More than 20,000 acres scorched as winds fuel Arizona wildfire NASA's next Earth missions will monitor extreme weather
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