Burning Questions: How do cuts to NOAA impact all of us?
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June 1st marks the start of hurricane season, and one meteorologist in Miami used the moment to deliver some pretty scary news. His name is John Morales. How We Survive listeners might remember him from our season on Miami.

And he kicked off this year's hurricane season playing an old clip of himself from 2019. Listen, I've been on this, you know, since 8 o'clock this morning on social media. And there is a lot of anxiety out there. On that late summer day six years ago, Hurricane Dorian, a powerful and destructive Category 5 hurricane, looked like it might be headed for South Florida. And people were scared. Because you don't see it turning.

Right. When is it going to turn? John, it's not turning. It's coming straight to us. With steady confidence, John told viewers the hurricane would definitely turn, missing Florida. It's going to turn. All right. Now, John says he was able to make that prediction six years ago with confidence, thanks to accurate forecasting from the National Weather Service. And I am here to tell you that I'm not sure I can do that this year.

because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack

on science in general, but specifically, let's talk about the federal government cuts to the National Weather Service and to NOAA. The National Weather Service is a branch under NOAA. That's the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The Trump administration and DOGE recently cut 600 jobs at the National Weather Service and are calling for even more cuts to NOAA.

John says that's meant that weather stations are severely understaffed and the quality of weather forecasting has degraded. John says there's been a 17 percent reduction in weather balloon launches. The National Weather Service uses these balloons to collect daily weather data from around the country.

To get a better sense of the impact these cuts are having on the Weather Service, I called up Louie Uccellini, the former director of the National Weather Service. John Morales told viewers he was worried he might not be able to give as precise and accurate weather forecasting because of the cuts to NOAA and the Weather Service. Was he exaggerating?

John doesn't exaggerate. Yeah, I was alarmed when he got on the air and just laid all that out. I'm Amy Scott, and welcome to How We Survive. Louie Uccellini and four other former National Weather Service directors recently wrote an open letter condemning the Trump administration for proposing a nearly 30% cut to NOAA for next fiscal year.

In the letter, Louie and the other former directors say more cuts to NOAA could hurt its ability to conduct research and climate monitoring, negatively impacting weather forecasting. Without accurate and reliable information on hurricanes, storms, and climate change, people won't be prepared. They might not know if or when to evacuate.

So in this latest installment of Burning Questions, we're asking, how do cuts to NOAA impact all of us? So here we are a few weeks into the start of hurricane season, and many are concerned that because of cuts to the weather service, it may be harder to accurately predict and track storms. Without accurate weather forecasts and data from NOAA, what does extreme weather season look like?

Well, we know through history that without a forecast and warning system, disasters occur. Whether it's the children's blizzard in the middle part of the country in 1888,

where children went to school in a nice warm environment and got slammed by a blizzard while they were in there. Hundreds of kids and teachers were killed. New York City in 1888 also didn't have a forecast or warning for its blizzard of '88, and they don't know exactly how many people were killed. They were pulling people who went out to work in the morning, they pulled them out of snowdrifts three days later.

We know that. Severe weather outbreaks, without the forecast warnings and decision support services, those severe weather outbreaks kill more people. I don't think there's any question this country needs those services for their livelihoods. Now, what was behind these cuts? I mean, this was part of the doge efforts to make the government more efficient, cut out waste and abuse cuts.

You were a director of the National Weather Service. Did you see areas for improvement on that front? Well, every director will tell you that as we go through every budget cycle, we're always looking for the optimal way, the best way, and the least expensive way to provide services to the American people. So

We are constantly working the budget process, whether it's developing the budgets or tracking the budgets through the fiscal year. And waste, fraud, and abuse was not words used in any review of the National Weather Service during my nine years as the director, and also the previous over 20 years that I was in the Weather Service.

They use those phrases, but clearly the way they approach the firing of people, especially letting go, you know, the first round was letting go. Those on probation had just been hired over the last year or two, top job.

top people in every category within the Weather Service, highly competitive. And so it's not clear what they were using as reasons for doing this in such an arbitrary, cruel, and uninformed way. So I can't find a reason. And they haven't really been clear about a reason other than they came in with an agenda to cut.

It seems the Trump administration itself has acknowledged maybe it went too far in firing workers. Now it's been rehiring some or at least filling some positions that were cut. Do you sense that the service has been restored adequately in preparation of what's coming this severe weather season? So, you know, that's a step in the right direction, clearly. Yeah.

I mean, the initial probationary folks that were spread throughout the Weather Service and NOAA that were let go are still on administrative leave. We still have gaps. There are offices that are close to or have been part-time. And I know there's a focus on hurricanes, as there rightfully should be, but I have to emphasize, we're also in a severe weather season.

We're also in a fire weather year. We don't have fire weather seasons anymore. Look at Los Angeles. That's a catastrophic fire that happened in January. All right. So forecast offices have to be prepared for multiple events.

flooding, there were people, fast water rescues that were going on just southwest of Washington, D.C. Those water rescue people were pre-positioned based on forecasts and warnings issued by the National Weather Service. This is that collaborative relationship now that is established between the Weather Service and emergency management at every government level.

That's been authorized by Congress in the 2017 Weather Act that President Trump signed. So these are critical situations. Can you talk a little bit about some of the technology that goes into weather forecasting and how that might be affected by both the staffing cuts and also proposed cuts for the coming fiscal year?

The use of satellites is incredibly important, more sophisticated satellites than ever before in terms of observing not only for an ongoing potential and in development of severe weather elements, but the data from the satellite, the global coverage is also essential

for numerical modeling. The RadiaSonde, which is a technology that goes back to World War II, pre-World War II, and then developed globally after World War II to support the aviation industry, has become increasingly sophisticated. Those balloon releases are absolutely crucial for not only severe weather prediction and other aspects of weather forecasting, but also for numerical modeling.

And all this data, the satellite, the Radiosonde, these Argo floats in the oceans, all of these are incredibly important data.

And reliable. They have to be on time every time. There's a six-hour cycle to the numerical prediction that's done on major, you know, the largest computers that we can apply to these models. All of this has to run on time every time, every six hours.

And for that, you need people who are monitoring, knowledgeable if something's going wrong. So you have this whole array of very advanced new technology type systems, whether they're in space, on the ground, affecting these forecasts. And then you got the radars, you know, very sophisticated dual Doppler radars, which have now been applied across the entire United States over the past 20 years. And people have seen these.

And what they can do for situational awareness, for aircraft safety and takeoff and landings, tornado warnings, which can now be issued by signatures in that radar. Radars don't see tornadoes, but there are signatures in there that can be related to the potential development at upper levels before they reach the ground.

All of these systems have to be operated and maintained by highly technical people, experts that come to us from the military, from private sector, and from the university community. So this is the types of systems that science-based service that the National Weather Service is known for working collaboratively

with science community throughout the United States and actually around the globe to make these the best possible forecasts and warnings we can issue for the American public.

It's kind of mind-blowing to hear you describe all that goes into this weather forecasting. And it occurs to me that this isn't just about the weather, but also tracking climate change. I mean, what's at stake if we don't have the same level of observation and data recording and data sharing? Well, you know, you get into the climate change arena within the current administration, it's a science experiment.

And it's an ongoing event that basically wants to be put aside, perhaps because of the enormity of the effort that's going to be needed to adapt to it. It's not just a mitigation strategy. It's an adaptation strategy. From a weather forecast perspective, the warming climate is also playing a role that we have to take into account on a day-to-day basis.

So with a warmer climate, you can hold more water vapor. The atmosphere can hold more water vapor. When that water vapor condenses into precipitation, it releases heat energy. That's a heat energy that helps fuel hurricanes, for example. It's a feedback mechanism into precipitation systems. You get...

Not only do you get more precipitation out of an event, but you can get extreme rates of precipitation that we've seen now over the last 10 years. It's just not a matter of getting more precipitation. It's getting concentrated into a smaller time frame. So you get these enormous damaging effects.

floods that occur in areas like Asheville, North Carolina. You had the situation in New York in 2021, where Tropical Storm Henry produced record rainfall rates of above two inches an hour, only to be smashed two weeks later by Ida with rainfall rates of five inches in an hour. The first time that a flood emergency was declared for the entire city of New York, all five boroughs

at the same time, right? So when you have these kind of events, we have to account for it in a way we make the forecast and also communicate the potential risk. These are science and technology issues that are driving the challenges of the forecasters, not just the normal aspect of weather forecasting, which we all know is not perfect,

There's a level of uncertainty in all forecasts, which grows with time. And yet people on the ground, people serving the economy are actually going to have to deal with. So these are all the challenges that the weather service people that we just talked about before are preparing themselves for as they enter some of this collaborative relationship between the weather service and decision makers. And if you just arbitrarily start firing people, you start pulling that apart.

So you increase the risk. And that's a concern that we all should share. It's already a challenge in the case of hurricane forecasts, for example, to get folks to take the warning seriously. Do you worry that these cuts and the hiring and refiring and rehiring could undermine confidence in the National Weather Service and the information people are getting? Yes, we do worry about that.

That's a general concern we should all have. The National Weather Service and emergency managers that do their job, they're incredible. They will do everything possible not to make those concerns happen. They go the extra mile.

We saw the example several weeks ago in Eastern Kentucky. The office was down to seven people. They planned their schedule so everybody was in the day of, the night of, the next day, and the next day were in that office. They were sleeping in that office. So they wouldn't miss a beat. But that's not the situation you want people in when they got to make very difficult decisions.

Louis Uccellini is former director of the National Weather Service. Thank you so much for your time. Okay, thank you.

We reached out to NOAA for a response to the concerns weather experts have raised. In a statement, the agency said, quote, "The National Weather Service continues to meet its core missions amid recent reorganization efforts and is taking steps to prioritize critical research and services that keep the American public safe and informed. National Weather Service is committed to investing in new technology and prioritizing public safety."

Thanks so much for listening. We love hearing from you. Do you have any pressing questions about the climate crisis? Maybe it's about something you're seeing in the news, or maybe it's specific to your household. Like, when is the right time to invest in an electric vehicle? Please send us a note, or better yet, you can send us a voice memo of your question. You can email us at survive at marketplace.org.

I'm your host, Amy Scott. Our senior producer is Haley Hirschman. She also produced this episode. Bridget Bodner is the director of podcasts. Caitlin Esch is the deputy managing editor. Francesca Levy is the executive director. Scoring and mixing by Brian Allison. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Neil Scarborough is the vice president and general manager of Marketplace.

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