Mass argues that technological shortcomings are not the sole problem, however. He also blames “poor organization and poor leadership at NOAA — their efforts are divided into uncoordinated groups, each trying to protect their turf.” According to Conrad Lautenbacher, who led NOAA from 2001 to 2008, “There is no orderly process to take some really great idea somebody has in research and turn it into something that the weather service can use.” Dysfunctional, compartmentalized bureaucracy gets in the way.

Five months after Hurricane Sandy, Roker reported a story for “NBC Nightly News” in which he interviewed Mass about the inadequacies of the Weather Service. Lapenta, at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, was on a treadmill at his gym a few days after NBC aired the report. “The woman next to me was working out with her trainer and talking about the difference between the G.F.S.” — Global Forecast System, the National Weather Service’s go-to model — “and the European model,” Lapenta says. It was the first time in his 28-year career as an atmospheric scientist that Lapenta overheard the merits of competing weather models discussed in casual chitchat. He credits the change largely to Mass.

Even though Lapenta got his new supercomputers in January, most of the system remains idle. “It’s extraordinary,” Mass says. “They are only using a small portion of it.” He also notes that the upgrades still aren’t enough to run high-resolution ensembles effectively. Lapenta, however, remains optimistic; he’s involved with NOAA’s Next Generation Global Prediction Initiative, and he formed an advisory committee to evaluate the National Weather Service’s numerous models and come up with a plan to build better ones. He invited Mass to join the 14-member team, which met for the first time in the summer of 2015.

“I came away very sobered,” Mass says. “It’s a real mess. They are running way too many models.” At last count, the centers managed at least a dozen models, some in development, others already operating. None work very well. (They recently spent eight years and more than $100 million trying to fix their main hurricane-forecasting model. But it still performs so poorly that meteorologists inside the agency want to scrap it altogether.) Mass’s advice was to focus all efforts on designing a single high-performance weather model that can be adapted to predict weather at a regional scale, similar to what the European Center and Britain’s Met Office are already doing. But there is heavy resistance from the National Weather Service union to any associated downsizing. In a blog post Mass wrote, “When I talk to middle-level managers in the N.W.S., they complain about [its] powerful unions that slow down innovation and new ways of doing business.”

In the summer of 2015, Mass visited Boulder to give a presentation at a conference on weather modeling. His 12-minute talk focused on the poor performance of regional models, which typically bring higher resolution to smaller geographical areas, and should, as a result, be better at predicting localized events, like flash floods and hurricanes. But they’re not — a fact Mass demonstrated with PowerPoint slides of statistics. He concluded his presentation with a photo of a man doing a face palm, above which he had typed, “Em-bar-rass-ment: the shame you feel when your inadequacy or guilt is made public.” The audience of 200 groaned. But when I chatted with scientists during a lunch break, they told me the chiding was expected — after all, this was Cliff Mass at the lectern. As a research meteorologist with NOAA put it, “Cliff is very excellent at being provocative.”

The next evening I had dinner with Mass at the Chautauqua Dining Hall, which has a wraparound patio looking onto the Flatirons, a succession of towering rock slabs. We chose an outdoor venue because a forecast earlier in the day predicted a dry evening. “I’m hoping to get in a hike later,” he said. Midway through our meal, lightning crackled overhead, followed by pelting rain. This was, Mass said, a classic example of a model’s failing at the most basic level — it couldn’t even forecast the weather just a few hours in advance.

As we ate, Mass ranted about the storms the Weather Service flubbed over the past winter. But Mass got most excited when I asked him to discuss high-resolution ensembles. The violent thunderstorms and frequent tornadoes (there were 1,259 in 2015) that routinely thrash the Great Plains and Midwest — killing more than 100 people each year over the last decade — could be predicted far more skillfully with high-resolution ensemble forecasts. So, too, could hurricanes like Matthew. “But we don’t even have enough computer power to do it,” Mass said. He opened an app on his iPhone called RadarScope, made by a private company, that projects where a storm is most likely headed.

“It looks like it’s moving away,” he said. “I can still get that hike in.” Mass excused himself and set off on a nearby trail. He walked warily, stopping often to scan the clouds for clues to an impending downpour, all while imagining a forecast that someday would be able to simply tell him when and where it will rain.