On the Eve of Hurricane Season, Brutal Cuts to Readiness

Above, yes, we are seeing more strong hurricanes. We have enough data now to show it.
The clip comes from this week’s 100 hours of Live Streaming presentations in support of NOAA researchers now under attack, which ends today.
(looks like the stream is being posted, it’s like a great grad course in climate meteorology)
I managed to capture part of Kerry Emanuel’s invaluable presentation, I’m hoping the rest of the stream will be archived. Hope Kerry doesn’t mind me using this clip.
Dr. Emanuel reminds us of recent research completed by IPCC lead author Jim Kossin, who I have interviewed several time, and have inserted an excerpt below. His message:

“Whether or not you have more storms or less storms, When you do have a storm, it is more likely to become a major hurricane than it was 40 years ago.”

Michael Lowery in New York Times (gift link):

But as we head into what NOAA forecasts will be another active Atlantic hurricane season, the Trump administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are downsizing the agency, which houses the National Weather Service, the hurricane hunters and many other programs crucial to hurricane forecasters. Without the arsenal of tools from NOAA and its 6.3 billion observations sourced each day, the routinely detected hurricanes of today could become the deadly surprise hurricanes of tomorrow.

The National Weather Service costs the average American $4 per year in today’s inflated dollars — about the same as a gallon of milk — and offers an 8,000 percent annual return on investment, according to 2024 estimates. It’s a farce for the administration to pretend that gutting an agency that protects our coastlines from a rising tide of disasters is in the best interests of our economy or national security. If the private sector could have done it better and cheaper, it would have, and it hasn’t.

Losing the hurricane hunters would be catastrophic, but that would be only the forerunner wave in a brutal, DOGE-directed tsunami to weather forecasting. In just three months DOGE has dealt the National Weather Service, which operates 122 local forecast offices around the country, the equivalent of over a decade of loss to its work force. Some offices have hemorrhaged 60 percent of their staff members, including entire management teams.

National Weather Service forecast offices — typically staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — are the source of all weather warnings received by Americans by phone, TV and radio. Without these warnings and data, local weather broadcasts and private weather apps couldn’t operate.

With dozens of local forecast offices struggling to maintain 24/7 operations, NOAA put out a mayday on May 13 asking remaining staff members to temporarily vacate their posts to salvage what was left of the nation’s critical warning network. Nearly half of local forecast offices are critically understaffed, with a vacancy rate of 20 percent or higher, and several are going dark for part of the day, increasing the risk of weather going undetected and people going unprotected and unwarned.

The staff reshuffling is just the latest move from an agency fighting for survival. Weather balloons, a mainstay of data collection for more than 60 years, usually launch twice a day from 100 sites around North America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. But recently some of their flights were reduced or suspended so that limited staffs can tend to other priorities.

Even in the satellite era, weather balloons have been shown to markedly improve forecast accuracy, so much so that twice-daily launches are commonly supplemented with up to four launches a day ahead of major hurricane threats. The extra balloons increase forecast confidence and allow time-sensitive decisions like evacuation orders to be made sooner. On the precipice of a new hurricane season, balloon launches are down 15 to 20 percent nationwide, throwing the nation into a risky experiment that nobody wanted to run.