How Far Can We Degrade Our Hurricane Forecasting Before People End Up Dead?

New York Times

2 days ago

As darkness descended on the Gulf of Mexico in October, a 1970s-era U.S. government turboprop plane neared the eye of the newly formed Hurricane Milton. When the plane's first radar scan arrived by satellite communications, I pounced and took to the airwaves, describing to viewers what I saw inside the storm: a dreaded vortex alignment signaling the early stages of rapid intensification. On social media I put it more plainly: 'Katy bar the door, this one's about to put on a show.'
And Milton did just that, strengthening at a breathtaking rate over the next 24 hours to a 180-mile-per-hour Category 5 monster, the strongest Gulf hurricane in almost 20 years. But there was no October surprise on the Florida coast because we'd had ample warning from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane hunters — enough time for people in the highest-risk areas to safely evacuate and businesses to prepare for the worst.
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.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.