The surprising ways U.S. weather data powers everyday commerce

Washington Post

23-05-2025

What to stock on the shelves. Which airport destination to choose for a freight shipment. The specifications for bridge building.
Across the country, retailers make calls every day based on weather and climate data from the Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These agencies' datasets and services — all based on an expansive network of satellites, data buoys, balloons, aircraft and weather stations that collect more than a billion environmental observations every day — play a key role in the nation's economy, research shows.
'Most of the economy is built off of [NOAA data] in some way because weather affects everything,' said climate scientist Tom Di Liberto, who worked as a public affairs specialist for the agency until he was laid off alongside hundreds of other probationary employees in March.
Now, some in the private sector are worried about ongoing staff and funding cuts at the agency, as well as President Donald Trump's proposal to slash more than $1.6 billion from the agency's budget.
A NOAA spokesperson said the cuts are focused on 'projects and reports that are viewed as obsolete, burdensome or unnecessary,' and that the agency would continue to serve the commercial sector and guard public safety.
But interviews and reviews of agency documents show the list of proposed cuts includes services used by businesses that people depend on every day. Here are some of the sectors that most rely on NOAA — and what could happen if those resources are cut:
Several years ago, managers at Honda Power Equipment noticed a strange trend in their sales data: If there had been a late-season snowstorm one winter, people were more likely to purchase snowblowers the following fall. The recent memory of shoveling by hand, the company realized, perhaps inspired customers to buy a power tool to deal with the next year's storms.
The company knew this trend could help with decisions about when and where to stock snowblowers, according to a 2017 case study.
So Honda turned to NOAA's Regional Snowfall Index (RSI), which ranks and maps snowstorms based on size, severity and ways people are affected.
With that data, Honda can make 'recommendations to retailers to stock their merchandise in the most strategic locations to optimize sales,' the case study said.
That report, produced for NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), cites several other retailers who use agency datasets to make decisions.
The food company Conagra said it used NOAA's monthly state of the climate reports to show how canned tomato sales spike during cold weather — which helped the company market its goods to grocers. Foot Locker said it depends on temperature and precipitation data to budget for heating, air conditioning and other utility costs at its stores.
In a budget document reviewed by The Washington Post in April, the Trump administration proposed a 25 percent cut in funding for NCEI — which produces the Regional Snow Index, monthly climate reports and other environmental datasets.
'When you impact NOAA and its partners, you're impacting the entire workflow and research and data flow process that very directly affects our economy,' said Jenny Dissen from the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies who oversees NOAA collaborations with the retail sector.
In January 1994, a surprise blizzard struck Louisville, dropping nearly 16 inches of snow and bringing the entire city — including its massive UPS air hub — to a standstill. The unexpected delays proved so costly to the shipping company that UPS decided to launch its own meteorology team to ensure it was never caught off-guard again.
'Someone awaiting a package in Bangkok doesn't care if it snowed in Louisville, Kentucky,' Randy Baker, a senior meteorologist for UPS Airlines, told The Post in 2014. 'They want their stuff.'
Even though UPS and other delivery companies have their own meteorology units, they still rely heavily on a NOAA service known as the 'climate disk.' The extensive dataset contains information from nearly 6,500 sites around the world, ranging from monthly climate summaries to hourly updates about temperature, precipitation, wind and other environmental factors.
In a 2018 report, FedEx meteorologist Kory Gempler explained how the company depends on this data to determine the likelihood of visibility issues like fog that might prevent aircraft from being able to land on certain runways at particular airports. That information is then used to determine whether freight should be sent to a more distant airport and then transported by truck the rest of the way to its destination.
A spokeswoman for FedEx said the company's 13 meteorologists still use the climate disk for their operations, but declined to comment on how the company might be affected by any cuts to NOAA's budget.
NOAA also oversees fisheries for hundreds of different species of aquatic life — and gathers data that ensures harvests are sustainable.
Data from commercial boats and vessel tracking systems, for example, feed into analyses known as stock assessments. Scientists determine the abundance of species such as red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific salmon, Alaskan crab and Atlantic sea scallop to inform quotas that guide how much commercial fishing boats can harvest while also protecting vulnerable species.
Those efforts supported 1.8 million jobs in the fishing and seafood industries as of 2019, according to NOAA.
For some in the fishing industry, there is disagreement about how accurate NOAA's population estimates can be, said Dustin Delano, a fourth-generation Maine lobsterman and chief operating officer for the New England Fishermen's Stewardship Association.
But Delano said he also worries that, if cuts to NOAA staff and budgets slow down the process of managing key commercial fisheries, it could add new layers of financial uncertainty that are putting many fishing operations out of business.
'We want to make sure it's done in a strategic way so our fisheries can still operate,' Delano said.
For years, engineers have eagerly anticipated the release of NOAA's Atlas 15, a gigantic new map of precipitation estimates that will indicate the kinds of rainstorms that are likely to happen in every community in the country.
Dan Walker, a geologist at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said new data will be key to ensure that buildings, bridges and other infrastructure can withstand weather where they're built. For example, the amount of snow an area receives can determine whether someone constructs their home using 2-by-4s or sturdier (and more expensive) 2-by-6 studs.
'If you make the wrong choice, your roof will collapse,' said Walker, who co-chairs a joint task force with NOAA aimed at improving building codes to account for extreme weather fueled by climate change. 'But if you make the other wrong choice, you'll spend 25 percent more on your house unnecessarily.'
For some places, he said NOAA's precipitation estimates have not been updated in more than 20 years. And unlike previous precipitation maps, Atlas 15 was supposed to incorporate projections for how rainfall could change over the next century as a result of human-caused warming.
The research is mostly complete and is undergoing peer review. But the funding for finalizing the work and making it publicly available is in question, Walker said, as the Trump administration targets NOAA's climate programs for elimination. Already, an analysis of the technical documentation for Atlas 15 shows that references to 'global warming' were recently changed to 'global temperature.'
Civil engineers — and the communities that rely on them — can't afford for Atlas 15 or other NOAA projects to be curtailed, Walker said. No other institution can match the scope, depth and reliability of the agency's data.
'If we're doing civil infrastructure, the American public needs to be able to understand where is the data coming from, how are the calculations being done,' he added. 'And to date, the only place we can do that is NOAA.'
John Muyskens contributed to this report.