Urgent! Vikings required (no metal components please). No time to explain!

I'm used to hearing tedious stereotypes about English food and British weather, but on the former point it seems that the Americans are armed with some real evidence. The Warm Bosom of my Motherland is looking decidedly cold and damp. In fact, I'm somewhat concerned that it may sink into the sea altogether, which could put me in a difficult situation.

If a nation sinks into the sea, is it still a nation? More to the point, will my passport still be valid? I find air travel to be a dolorous enough process as it is, without ending up stuck in an arrivals hall for thirty years because the INS don't have the forms to deal with someone from a submarine state. American bureaucracy can be slow to adapt: the last time a nation slipped into the sea was Atlantis, and back then all you needed to enter a new country was a boatload of heavily-armed Norse warriors, and operating procedures have not yet caught up. The protocols for dealing with quasi-aquatic non-residents simply aren't in place, and it's not as easy as it used to be to sneak a hundred hairy Vikings through security - their helms keep setting off the metal detectors, and the other passengers complain about the smell.

In addition to the administrative headaches of being a citizen of a sub-oceanic nation (I haven't even considered to question of my tax code), I have a couple of decent suits still in storage in the UK, so I really hope it stops raining soon. On the other hand I have a few creditors over there that I wouldn't mind seeing sink to the bottom of the North Sea, so I suppose that every cloud does have a silver lining.

The band played on, as England went down

Weather forecasters develop time machine!

Bill Proenza, the (now) former head of the National Hurricane Center (NHC), has been fired by the US Department of Commerce for failing 'to demonstrate leadership', and creating bad blood amongst his staff. The fact that he was supposed be sowing bad blood amongst his staff appears to be forgotten, for the simple reason that he demonstrated plenty of leadership, but of the wrong sort.

Proenza was given the job to reform the NHC. Now, like any other large public sector organization in this country, National Weather Service staff are loathe to change anything. After all, they might need to learn something new or adapt to change, which distracts them from the important public sector goals of sitting on one's fat, lazy backside until pension day. For example, about thirty years ago the previously-independent National Weather Service (of which the NHC is a part) became a branch of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the employees are still sore about it today. Most of them were under the age of ten when it happened, but they don't let that stop them from harbouring a career-span of embittered rancour. Therefore, it can be seen that the job of reforming the NHC and irritating its employees are more or less synonymous. Indeed, Proenza was happily reforming NHC and upsetting his dogmatic staff for months, with his overlords in Washington DC perfectly happy with his performance. Unfortunately, he then chose to open his mouth and say something uncharacteristically intelligent.

This year, the NOAA celebrates its two hundredth anniversary. Happy birthday, NOAA. That's somewhat surprising, since just seven years ago NOAA celebrated its thirtieth birthday. It would be nice to think that NOAA had developed a time machine, after all just think how reliable weather forecasts would be if you could just skip back and forth in time. Unfortunately, it's just the usual public sector arse-hattery. Two hundred years ago President Jefferson ordered the creation of nautical charts of the US coast for the safe passage of ships, a role that is within NOAA's current remit.

Simultaneously, the NASA QuikSCAT satellite is nearing the end of its useful lifecycle (actually, it is past its design life) with no end in sight. QuikSCAT is a rare bird, one of the only space-borne scatterometers in operation around the globe. A space-borne scatterometer is a satellite that detects the roughness of the ocean surface, and because the roughness of the ocean is a direct result of surface wind we can retrieve surface wind data from that. Considering that surface weather stations are sparse over the ocean, and that 66% of the world's surface is ocean, one doesn't need to be a climatologist to realise how useful these instruments are for both operational forecasting and climate research.

Why then, asked Mr Proenza of Congress, are we spending $4 million to celebrate the 37-year-old NOAA's 200th anniversary, when one of the only instruments still in service capable of giving decent coverage surface wind estimates is about to grind to a halt for the very last time?

Suddenly, the happiness of the NHC staff became of prime importance, Mr Proenza was 'removed from service'. Like an obsolete satellite, the wreckage of his career splashed down into the middle of a lonely, unobserved ocean.