Should We Talk About The Weather? Should We Talk About The Government?
But think of all the money these NOAA cuts are saving!
Severe storms this week have caused tornadoes, high winds, and flooding across large parts of the country since Wednesday, killing a least seven people so far, with more storms expected in the Midwest and Southeast in the next few days. The wave of storms comes as the National Weather Service (NWS) is coping with huge job losses thanks to Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s war on government agencies, especially the ones that deal with climate change, which Trumpers consider a made-up “religious” belief that can be safely ignored. The current storms follow another heavy storm system in March that killed at least 39 in tornadoes, high winds, and wildfires.
The weather service’s parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has lost at least 2,000 workers between firings, layoffs of “provisional” employees, and people taking/being pushed to take buyouts, leading to about 20 percent fewer staff dealing with the same amount of weather, which the administration has been unable to cut.
In addition to the staff cuts, NOAA will shut down a number of its research division’s websites because its contracts with web services providers have been cancelled, according to Bloomberg News (gift link).
As a result, almost all external websites reliant on Amazon, Google and WordPress services are poised to vanish early Saturday morning in Washington, wiping the bulk of the unit’s work, which includes climate and environmental science research, from public view.
Sure, that sounds bad, but you probably didn’t visit those sites anyway, so you won’t even notice they’re gone.
Scientists have been warning that the mass firings will harm weather forecasting and endanger the public, especially as hurricane season approaches. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to prove any links between the staff cuts and potential loss of life due to extreme weather, which kills people no matter how good the forecasts are. But any loss of lead time in warning the public, especially in the case of tornadoes, will make it harder for people to take shelter.
Already this week, the National Weather Service office in Louisville, Kentucky, announced that because of staffing shortages, it wouldn’t be able to send teams out to survey the damage from tornadoes that hit the area Wednesday, at least not until after currently forecast storms have cleared, probably near the end of this weekend. In the meantime, the office asked members of the public to send the office photos of storm damage. NWS Louisville meteorologist Brian Neudorff explained that such crowdsourced photos would help the office “evaluate the damage and it will allow us to plan on where we need to go once we have the available staff to survey.”
Local TV station WAVE also very responsibly reported that the Weather Service announcement didn’t directly link the staffing issues to the mass shitcannings at NOAA, instead leaving the audience to put two and two together.
The staffing cuts have also forced multiple NWS locations to cut weather balloon launches from twice daily to just one a day. Some locations will halt balloon launches altogether, presumably because some other launch site is close enough for diminished government work. Not huge cuts — yet — just reductions or suspensions of balloon launches at 11 sites so far, a tenth of those that had been in use.
The NWS uses these weather balloons, until recently launched twice per day from 100 total locations, to gather temperature, wind, pressure and other data from the ground up to approximately 100,000 feet. The results are compiled along with data from satellites, radar stations, surface weather stations, buoys and aircraft to build weather models and forecasts that are public and freely available.
Former NOAA weather data boffin Michael Morgan, now an atmospheric science professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that the reduced data may not be critical just yet, but it will make a difference to forecasts’ overall accuracy and timeliness:
“We’re going to lose data because of this staffing,” Morgan said in a press conference Monday. “And that loss of data then translates into less precise forecasts, more uncertainties in the forecast.
“Does it mean every single forecast is going to be poor? No, but it does mean that the uncertainties in our forecast will grow over time.”
Alan Sealls, the president-elect of the American Meteorological Society, offered a more striking metaphor, comparing losing some weather balloon data to knocking a few bolts here and there out of the steel frame for an office tower: “Nobody can say how many bolts you can leave out or remove before the structural integrity is compromised.”
We hasten to point out that this is indeed just a metaphor, and not an accusation that weather balloons did 9/11.
The tragic thing here is that improvements in weather forecasting have led to significantly fewer deaths from extreme weather in the US and around the world. That’s primarily because forecasters have been able to give the public greater lead time in warning of conditions that will spawn tornadoes, as well as more accurate forecasts of the track of hurricanes, interventions by presidential Sharpie notwithstanding.
Former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad told CNN the staffing cuts will definitely lead to a decline in reliability of forecasts:
“Any reduction in staffing at a weather forecast office will result in either delays in the forecast being issued, and watches and warnings as well, or an erosion of quality. […] It wouldn’t surprise me at all if at the end of the season we’ve gone back by a few years – maybe a decade – in terms of capability.”
Spinrad led NOAA during the Biden administration, however, so we’re certain that the seasoned science experts on Twitter will explain that forecasts were good enough a decade ago, and that government scientists have only themselves to blame for losing their jobs because they kept saying climate change was real, even though that’s now illegal, and besides, now that Florida is preparing to outlaw “weather manipulation,” the number of deadly storms will definitely go down, so there.
Yes, kids, we’re now going to enter a new age of stupid online arguments. It’ll be a bit like climate change. We know a warmer atmosphere is causing more extreme weather events, but it remains hard to attribute any particular storm’s effects to a warming climate. In some cases, like the heavier rainfall, greater storm surge, and rapid increase in severity of hurricanes in recent years, the connections are quite clear: Warmer air can hold far more moisture, warmer water expands, and higher ocean temperatures provide hurricanes a lot more energy to grow quickly. But tornadoes are such short-lived events, dependent on lots of variables, that the exact connections are still difficult to determine.
Similarly, as Spinrad and others make clear, staffing cuts in the NWS will enshittify forecasts overall, and it’s only logical to expect crappier forecasts will leave the public with less ability to prepare for or escape storms. But unless reduced staff causes some really glaring bit of information to go missing, it’ll be very hard to connect the job cuts to particular storm losses. We forecast dangerous levels of gaslighting on all this.
[AP / PBS Newshour / CNN / WAVE-TV / Inside Climate News / Bloomberg (gift link)]
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My first ladyfriend in college was Romanian, and she was fascinated by American tornadoes. When I asked why, she said that pretty much nowhere else in the world has them nearly as often. She was right: the US experiences 75% of the world's yearly reported tornadoes, and Europe sees barely any at all (only Russia has any significant number of them, and those are usually way the fuck out in steppe country where no one lives).
Not sure why I brought this up, other than it's the only thing I can really contribute instead of "holy fuck why is this country so stupid".
"We hasten to point out that this is indeed just a metaphor, and not an accusation that weather balloons did 9/11."
I really hope that Laura Looney doesn't read Wonkette, otherwise there will be no NOAA.