NWS and NOAA cuts impacting staffing, forecasts, research
DAYTON, Ohio (WDTN) – NOAA has been under the gun in 2025, with employees taking buyout options and probationary employees let go.
In a draft leaked to our partners at The Hill, NOAA can expect to be cut by 27 percent in 2026, and eliminate all funding for weather, climate and ocean laboratories, cooperative institutes, regional climate data and climate research.
'Cutting out these infrastructural pieces, we're essentially pulling the rug out from underneath our entire capacity to really understand what the atmosphere is doing and to make any kind of progress,' said Dr. Jana Houser, Ohio State University associate professor of meteorology and atmospheric sciences. 'And not only that, we're actually setting ourselves up to go backwards because we have to cut observations, and observations are the fuel to what drive our forecast models.'
Houser says this cut to funding will be felt by every part of weather forecasting.
'This is really ultimately catastrophic to our entire infrastructure for everything atmospheric science related, from climate change to your everyday weather forecasts that you get when you turn on whatever your favorite app is, to flood monitoring, flood prediction to ocean monitoring, etc.,' said Houser.
Those cuts wouldn't just impact the future of weather research, but also the quality of forecast that goes out.
'These research agencies are the ones that are doing the ground work to make numerical modeling better, to improve our scientific understanding of the way the Earth atmosphere system works,' said Houser.
The National Weather Service office located in Jackson, Kentucky has not been fully operational for over a week, and these closures could continue to grow as a hiring freeze is in place. This will lead to other offices picking up the slack, potentially leading to more missed severe storms.
'The fallout is that you have dropped warnings. You have people warning the wrong storms. You have miscommunication and misunderstanding between what's happening on the ground and what's happening in the forecast office. You have spotter reports coming in and you don't have enough people to figure out like, is that report for Storm X or Storm Y?' said Houser.
According to NBC News, the NWS Wilmington office, who forecasts for the Miami Valley, has been without their boss since the Meteorologist in Charge announced his retirement on LinkedIn in February.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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