Shutdown Affects Weather Prognostication

Sure, you think weather forecasting is bad anyway, but it could be much worse without government input:

On Monday afternoon, a line of storms hundreds of miles long crossed the Appalachians and struck cities on the Eastern seaboard. Earlier that day, tornado watch was issued, stretching from New York City to Washington, D.C., that lasted until 5 p.m.; broadcasts and web journalists picked up the news and transmitted it to millions in the affected region.
Most people who heard about that tornado watch learned about it from journalists and journalist-meteorologists who work at private media companies. But, perhaps without realizing it, everyone who heard about it depended upon the meteorologists, one level down and less visible, who work for the National Weather Service, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Americans, in other words, rely daily on the “vibrant public-private-academic partnership” that exists in the United States around weather, according to Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society. Every part relies on every part — and every part is suffering for the shutdown.
In a special blog post, Shepherd unfolds how the shutdown is damaging American meteorology. It’s easy to think, he writes, that “well, we are still getting our weather forecasts and warnings, and I still have the information from TV.”
But this, he says, is deeply naïve.
"Private sector companies and broadcast stations," he says:

are essential partners in the weather enterprise. However, most of the satellite, Doppler radar, and observational data are from federal sources. The major forecast models are run at NOAA facilities. Federal predictions centers and Forecast Offices issue warnings. I can’t imagine a major potato chip maker saying that it could survive without potato farms. The point herein is that there is a vibrant public-private-academic partnership and each component is essential.

(Emphasis mine.)
Those resources are still working, but all maintenance on them has halted. Many employees working at them have stopped being paid. American weather news depends on the American government.
But it goes beyond the news. Marshall proceeds to inventory what he sees as the cascading consequences of the shutdown. Some consequences are technical, he says: The United States might fail to develop weather models to rival Europe’s. The shutdown might exacerbate the upcoming, possible gap in functioning government weather satellites.

Again, I have never understood the Republican party's war on government scientific research and data gathering, other than that it prevents the private sector from screwing over citizens.  Most of the things the Republicans want to cut outside of social spending I think are the coolest things government does.  That is what keeps me from voting for those jackasses.