Designing NOAA’s new home

Wired : The National Oceanographic and Atmosphere Agency will move into new state-of-the-art quarters for its satellite operations next month. The building, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, tries to merge NOAA’s scientific research and capabilities into the design. The building appears as a slash of corrugated steel and prefabricated panels, fronted with a billboard-sized NOAA sign and topped by a half-dozen satellite dishes. Like one of the icebergs that NOAA studies, most of the facilities 208,000 square feet are hidden beneath a grass roof that blends the building into a meadow. The employees at the facility, have yet to be convinced that the work environment will be better.Meanwhile Science magazine reports that NOAA’s existing statistical models for predicting the strength of hurricanes, are not effective, and researchers remain unsure whether a computational model will improve the forecasters accuracy.