2025 hurricane season could see degraded forecasts because of weather service cuts
According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, Key West has four meteorologist positions that are unfilled. Tallahassee is down three. Melbourne and Tampa have two empty seats each.
The shortages have some experts worried that public services and forecasts may suffer this hurricane season, which is expected to again have above-normal activity.
'They won't have as much time to monitor what is going on at the local level, especially with short-fused warnings,' said James Franklin, former branch chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the National Hurricane Center about the local forecast offices. 'When they are short-staffed, two people have to do the job of three.'
While the National Hurricane Center forecasts the big picture for tropical cyclones — path, strength and size — the weather forecasting offices focus on the details for local communities.
And those details are critical, such as when Hurricane Milton shredded the state with 45 tornadoes in October, leaving six people dead in the Spanish Lakes Country Club Village mobile-home community in Fort Pierce. The Miami NWS office forecasts for seven counties, including Palm Beach County.
The meteorologists in weather forecasting offices are also responsible for working directly with county officials, translating the forecasts into the impacts and hazards that could be felt by individual communities.
Sometimes they embed in emergency operations centers to better help local officials decide when and who to evacuate as a storm approaches.
2025 hurricane season : New forecast calls for above normal season but questions remain
'It's not so much that the National Hurricane Center won't be able to get a forecast out, they will, but the local services will be degraded,' Franklin said.
It's unclear yet how many of the vacancies at the nation's 122 local forecast offices are a direct result of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency budget cuts.
Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said his office is working now to parse out that information from the 600 positions that were lost across the country this year.
About half of those were voluntary early retirements, while 108 were fired probationary employees. The remainder were voluntary deferred resignations, Fahy said.
The NWS has since announced it wants to hire 126 people, and it's asking for current employees to transfer to offices in need of critical positions including meteorologists, science and operations officers and warning-coordination meteorologists.
Miami and Key West are on that list as offices in need.
'The National Weather Service is doing their very level best to fill the critical vacancies ASAP, but when that will happen is to be determined,' Fahy said. 'We have hurricane season, but in California wildfire season has started, so we have two different weather disasters.'
Ken Graham, director of the NWS, said in May that local offices will get additional resources where needed during emergencies.
'Every warning is going to go out,' Graham said.
Although Graham, and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, have said that the National Hurricane Center is fully staffed, Fahy said there are five openings at the Miami-based hurricane center.
Those include a hurricane specialist, who forecasts the track, intensity and size of storms, a marine forecaster, and positions that maintain and update operational software.
More: Hurricane hunters save lives, but NOAA plane breakdowns, staffing shortages put them at risk
Franklin said it's typical for there to be a small number of vacancies at any given time at the NHC, and that while it is not fully staffed, 'they are reasonably well staffed.'
'I don't think that is true with the weather forecast offices,' Franklin said.
Fahy said Miami's NWS office has a 38% vacancy rate among its meteorologists. Key West was second highest at 30%.
There are six offices nationwide — none in Florida — that have shuttered their typical 24-hour operations between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., Fahy said.
Others have reduced their twice-daily weather balloon launches, which are important for measuring temperature, humidity and pressure in the atmosphere, as well as tracking wind speed and direction.
The Washington Post previously reported that since March 20, 17% of balloon launches nationwide that should have occurred didn't because of staffing losses.
A weather balloon that fails to launch in the Great Plains may not seem like it could hinder hurricane forecasts, but the lack of information on upper air movements — steering winds — can leave blind spots.
'I think it's safe to say that because of the reduction in weather balloon launches, that some forecasts this summer for hurricanes will be degraded,' Franklin said. 'The problem is it will be difficult to predict when those degradations might occur, how large they might be, and even after the fact, we might not now whether a particular forecast is bad because some launches didn't happen.'
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes for Yale Climate Connections, said he believes the loss of balloon data could mean the hurricane forecast cone will be too small this season, 'giving people overconfidence in the accuracy of the hurricane forecasts.'
'Such overconfidence can result in delayed evacuation decisions and failure to take adequate measures to protect lives and property,' Masters said.
Kimberly Miller is a journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate, weather, and the environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. Help support our local journalism, subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Hurricane Season 2025 forecasts could be hurt by Trump budget cuts
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