Opinion: gaps in weather radar coverage leave rural Black Belt communities more vulnerable, but it's complicated - Entrepreneur Generations

Graphic created and tweeted by meteorology student Jack Sillin. Click the image to enlarge it.

Severe storms and tornadoes in the Southeast left at least five people dead yesterday, some rural, Jan Wesner Childs reports for The Weather Channel. That makes all the more relevant a recent storm of another kind on Twitter about rural—and racial—disparities in weather warning systems. 

Cornell University meteorology student Jack Sillin, who grew up in the rural South, kicked off a debate on March 19 after tweeting that the National Weather Service's Radar Network leaves many rural Black Belt communities uncovered, and thus unwarned about severe storms. "Overlaying demographic data with radar coverage data, it's hard not to notice how the areas most underserved by NEXRAD are also majority-Black," Sillin tweeted.

Marshall Shepherd, a meteorology professor at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, believes Sillin's observation is fair and revealed "a convergence of science, geography and history that is worth a discussion," Shepherd writes for Forbes. Though the Black Belt is disproportionately poor and rural, both factors that make it less likely to be covered by weather radar, the disparity doesn't mean that other demographics or races in radar gaps are less important or less endangered, he writes, and it needn't detract from acknowledging that poor health and high death rates in the Black Belt and many Native American areas are rooted in racist policies.

Rurality is the main factor in coverage gaps, Shepherd writes: "In the South, this will bring a large Black population into play. In the West, it is likely to disproportionately impact Hispanic or Native American populations. Of course, these gaps will affect White populations in these regions too. It is important to shatter the narrative that highlighting one group’s challenge minimizes another group."

However they came about, "the gaps are still frustrating, impactful, and consistent with a long legacy of underinvestment in these communities," Sillin wrote in an email to Shepherd.

from The Rural Blog https://ift.tt/3vWC3xT Opinion: gaps in weather radar coverage leave rural Black Belt communities more vulnerable, but it's complicated - Entrepreneur Generations

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