The USA needs to get its act together! This last month the “premiere” GFS model has fallen to 4th place in global forecasting. It used to be #1. Cliff Mass (University of Washington) has an excellent post on why this is happening and why fear of getting supercomputers from the Chinese could be putting a halt to a fix.
http://www.cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-us-slips-to-fourth-place-in-global.html