Funding cuts by the Federal Aviation Administration could compromise the consistency of nearly seven decades of Madison snowfall data, weather experts say. “Anytime you’re doing record keeping where you want to look at long-term trends, you need a continuous data set,” Steven Ackerman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at UW–Madison, said. “Once you stop doing that — even for a year — you’ve lost the statistical significance and the continuation of that. Even though it seems like a small decision, it actually has big impacts on the data set.
Office of Strategic Communication