Budget cuts have already pushed the government-fueled weather forecasting industry to the edge, Shepherd said. The National Weather Service currently survives on less than $1 billion a year. Even deeper cuts are in the offing.

GOES-13, the satellite that monitors the eastern United States and the Caribbean “hurricane” basin, recently went offline. “We luckily had another out there, a spare,” Shepherd said.

But there are worries that the finite lifespans of aging satellites, coupled with constant budget cuts, could leave U.S. weather-watchers with a temporary blind spot, perhaps around 2017. “I tell people that weather satellites aren’t like a light bulb. We can’t just run down to Home Depot and replace it,” said the UGA professor, a former research meteorologist for NASA.

Then there’s the computer hardware, where European forecasters have their biggest advantage over their U.S. counterparts. Here in the U.S., forecasters use three-dimensional modeling for forecasts, Shepherd explained – snapshots of the atmosphere that are then analyzed for trends.

The acquisition of more expensive supercomputers has allowed Europeans to employ models that include constant updates – time – as a fourth dimension.