Cutting the Weather Service In an Age of Stronger Storms

What could go wrong?

New York Times:

A National Weather Service office in eastern Kentucky was scrambling to cover the overnight forecast on Friday as severe storms were moving through much of the eastern United States, according to the union that represents the department’s meteorologists.

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy.

Mr. Fahy said on Friday that because of the threat for flooding, hail and tornadoes facing eastern Kentucky, the Weather Service had to find forecasting help for the office.

A spokeswoman for the Weather Service said the Jackson office would be relying on nearby offices for support through the weekend.

It is not unusual for a forecasting office to rearrange staff members for extreme weather. But until recently, most would have at least two or three people scheduled around the clock.

Three other offices, in northwestern Kansas, Sacramento and Hanford, Calif., also no longer have forecasters overnight, Mr. Fahy said, and four more, in Cheyenne, Wyo., Marquette, Mich., Pendleton, Ore., and Fairbanks, Alaska, are days away from the same fate.

“For most of the last half century NWS has been a 24/7 operation — not anymore,” Mr. Fahy said.

Nearly 600 people have left the Weather Service in recent months, through a combination of layoffs and retirements, after the Trump administration demanded that it and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, make significant cuts. The Weather Service’s 122 forecasting offices have traditionally operated 24 hours a day, with each one responsible for monitoring the weather in its region.

Because of the staffing cuts, some offices have also curtailed the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data that fuels daily forecasts and forecast models. An agreement last month between the Weather Service and its employees’ union warned of “degraded” services as more people leave, and five of the department’s former directors recently wrote an open letter saying they feared the cuts had been so deep that lives would soon be endangered.

Kim Doster, a spokeswoman for NOAA, confirmed this week that “several local NWS offices are temporarily operating below around-the-clock staffing.”

Washington Post:

If not for the storms, the understaffed National Weather Service office responsible for monitoring weather hazards across eastern Kentucky would have gone dark by midnight. It’s one of a growing number of the agency’s local offices that have been unable to cover overnight shiftsafter the Trump administration significantly reduced staffing levels through buyouts and firings this year.

Washington Post:

For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country.

In four of the agency’s 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren’t enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.

Each of the offices has local knowledge about weather hazards and geographic features that helps improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and warnings and inform local officials’ decisions to close schools for wintry weather or evacuate residents ahead of hurricanes. Without a meteorologist working overnight, those offices’ duties to monitor conditions and issue forecasts and warnings will temporarily pass to neighboring offices each night, said Tom Fahy, the union’s legislative director.