Death of the Weather Forecast?
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Yeah, we are continuing to follow up on some of this storm damage that really has hit Kentucky. We're currently in Estill County on Furnace Junction Drive. Take a look at this home behind me. It has been absolutely crushed by a tree. Earlier this month, a series of powerful storms ripped across the plains, Midwest and South, causing severe damage in Tennessee, Missouri and Kentucky.

The National Weather Service confirms four tornadoes in Middle Tennessee from Thursday night's weather system. Wind speeds of up to 110 miles per hour were reported, snapping hundreds of trees and causing roof damage to homes. Multiple people were killed in Tennessee, Missouri, and Indiana. Powerful storms spawned dozens of tornadoes. And as people clean up and assess the damage, a new line of powerful thunderstorms is moving through this weekend. Typically, when severe weather hits, a

a constellation of experts comes together, many of whom work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. They're coordinating with the national offices. They're coordinating with emergency responders, with emergency managers. They're coordinating with all sorts of people to make sure the word gets out that the warnings are correct and timely and accurate. ♪

Daniel Swain is a weather and climate scientist with the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources. When I called up Daniel, I wanted to ask him about these storms because I'd heard that the local office of the National Weather Service in Louisville didn't conduct a typical post-storm survey.

Well, that's my understanding as well. And although it has been really difficult to get official confirmation of the whys surrounding any number of pretty conspicuous events recently in the Weather Service at NOAA that appear to be related to critical understaffing, essentially the fact that there simply aren't enough personnel to do all of the duties that are required to be done, that is what the reporting has said about that specific situation as well. And there's plenty of evidence this is a much more widespread problem right now.

Basically, because of the Trump administration's cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service, there aren't enough people to do these jobs in weather offices all across the country.

And it's not just post-storm surveys that are being eliminated. Some of the most basic forecasting is not happening either. Take weather balloons, for example. Normally, National Weather Service staffers routinely launch what are called radiosondes. These small devices float up with the balloons to measure all kinds of weather conditions. And essentially, the calculus has been made that that is not the best use of two to four person hours of time, even though it is an objectively very important thing to be doing.

We've also heard that certain weather offices in the U.S. are no longer able to answer the phone. I mentioned that was a critical function, but that's a pretty basic and kind of amazing capability that historically you could just call up your local meteorologist at the weather service and get a response from a trained, certified meteorologist who's knowledgeable about your own local area. That's no longer the case. During that same tornado and flood outbreak in Kentucky and the central U.S.,

There's one weather office in particular, I believe it was the one in Paducah, Kentucky, where the plumbing had failed some weeks before the tornado outbreak. And there was no ability for the government to repair the toilets. And so literally, in this case, there were National Weather Service meteorologists who had no facilities to use but a porta potty in the parking lot during a literal tornado outbreak and major flood event.

Today on the show, the decimation of NOAA, the National Weather Service, and what happens to Americans when the best storm prediction centers in the country are gutted. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, and you're listening to What Next TBD, a show about technology, power, and how the future will be determined. Stick around. ♪

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I want to back up a little bit and kind of walk through

some of the cuts and funding decisions we have seen and then the effects of those. Since March, hundreds of employees from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, have been laid off or been subject to some of these reductions in force. A lot of that includes cuts to the National Weather Service. When all of this started, what was your reaction?

Well, my initial reaction was, well, I guess we are doing exactly what was described in Project 2025 document. It specifically mentioned that NOAA was the, I believe this is a direct quote, the mouthpiece of the climate alarm industry and that the weather service should be, you know, dramatically downsized and downscaled. And the problem is that we are now seeing a lot of this take shape. And so what we're seeing, you know, and my initial reaction to this has been,

um, not, uh, shock or surprise really, um, just deep dismay because it was pretty clear this was, this was on the list of, of priorities and it appears to be headed in that direction. And of course the cuts we've seen so far, especially if this document is taken to be a policy blueprint, which it certainly seems to be in many respects, um,

This is just the beginning of the cuts that may yet still be to come and therefore the harm and disruption that may yet still be to come. I think we saw a preview of that last week with the leak of the passback document regarding next year's budget. Think of a passback as part of a negotiation between federal agencies and the Office of Management and Budget.

An agency will ask for a certain amount of money. The OMB will respond with its own number. That's the passback. It's like a working list of a White House's funding priorities. According to the leaked passback, the Trump administration would essentially eliminate an entire NOAA office, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Office. This office funds studies into weather and climate and events like flooding and wildfires.

The OAR has 10 research labs and 16 affiliated cooperative institutes across the country. The proposal would completely eliminate this office at NOAA and therefore virtually all of the weather and climate research departments

and disaster-related research that comes from it. And also, all of these freestanding, essentially, federal government labs all around the country. I'm sitting here today about a quarter mile from one of those labs in Boulder, Colorado, and it's a huge facility. I mean, it produces an enormous volume of research, not only on climate change, which seems to be one of the reasons or motivations behind some of these proposed cuts, but

But also things, again, as I mentioned, day-to-day weather, tornado outbreaks, heat waves, floods, hurricanes. And so, you know, all of this is really critical to the ability for us to understand how weather works, improve our weather predictions, let alone understand climate change. When there are so few people in these offices and when a major weather event like this happens, what?

What do communities suffer?

And property that's going to come from understaffing on a day like today necessarily, although I think even there we might underestimate it. But where the rubber really meets the road were these the critical understaffing and the inability to get this initial condition weather information through reduced observations and communications breakdowns potentially as these accelerate.

Where these are really going to pose problems is when the weather isn't like I just described today, when it isn't calm and benign. And even though, of course, extreme weather is less common than benign or ordinary weather, it can be hugely destructive and deadly. And at the margins, even a relatively incremental decrease in the ability of weather forecasters with the Weather Service to

to offer 24/7/365 life and property protection services, which is essentially what they're doing and what they're mandated to do through the congressional mandate to fund the organization, then that is where we start to see the potential for lives lost, for damage, rot, and economic harm done that would not have been done otherwise.

Just think about this year alone. A record-breaking snowstorm in January, a violent central plains storm in March that killed at least 42 people over the course of a weekend. Not to mention the L.A. fires. Still, Daniel says, lives were saved because of weather predictions. The L.A. fires, for example, it's very likely that that situation would have been significantly worse even than the catastrophe that unfolded

Because there were really good predictions in advance of an extreme wind event preceded by record dryness and extremely critical fire risk that triggered pre-positioning of firefighting resources, closures of parks and open areas. People couldn't park on the narrow streets and the hills of L.A. to make sure fire trucks could get in and out. All of that was on the basis of the National Weather Service predictions.

But what happens if the National Weather Service can't track all these storms? If they're so understaffed or their infrastructure and computers aren't maintained? Once that starts to break down, then even if you have the personnel locally, they may not have the tools and the information that they need to make those accurate forecasts. If the weather radar goes down at a moment where you didn't have those balloon launches, then...

Again, not an implausible scenario in the Midwest during a tornado outbreak. And we are, again, in peak tornado season. That's the kind of situation that could be directly life threatening and certainly economy threatening.

And that's just at the extremes. You know, the other purpose of NOAA and the Weather Service and weather prediction in general, it's not just to avert harm, although I would argue that's maybe the most important thing from my perspective, but it's also to increase efficiency, ironically. Think about logistics companies and airlines. Think about why if you've taken the same flight twice, it's usually not exactly the same path. And there are other reasons, but the

primary one is that the airline is using weather information, weather predictions to route the plane in a way that uses the least amount of fuel. So you're not flying directly into the strongest headwind, for example. So that's a case where, you know, obviously aviation safety depends on weather, but also just efficiency, saving money, burning less fuel, economic efficiency is one of the main things that's driven by effective weather forecasts.

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Noah and its adjacent offices are not the only federal departments that work on weather and climate research. NASA also does and is also at risk. Something like a top line 50 percent cut to NASA, for example, is in the same budget, which would virtually eliminate most Earth science and planetary science research. And again, the Earth that we live on is the subject of most planetary science that is funded here.

We live on a planet, by the way. But the broader picture is that weather and climate science generally advanced rapidly over the 20th century and has continued to do so into the first quarter of the 21st. Almost all of that advancement in the 20th century was funded by the American government. So through taxpayer dollars, through

At various points in time, depending on who sort of the organizational structure within the U.S. Federal Service, NOAA or NASA or the Department of Energy or the National Science Foundation or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, you know, the three big ones for climate are generally NOAA, NASA, and also NSF. The National Science Foundation. Thank you. And these have all been in the news in the past week for either actual observed and unnoticed

widening decimation of research priorities and profiles and just the number of funded grants or for proposed essential elimination of the research that they do. So the bigger picture is that the U.S.,

has arguably provided, you know, not just a public service to Americans, but to the world over the decades that it heavily invested in weather and climate research. Most of the big weather models and climate models that exist today were developed in large part in the United States using federal funding. Not 100%, of course. And now this is starting to shift a bit as other countries are now

preferentially investing more. The fact that we have good weather forecasts is largely because the United States government invested in that capacity for decades. And all of that is essentially at risk of coming to a grinding halt.

I want to talk a little bit about the follow-on impacts of some of the models created by the National Weather Service, right, to generate hourly and daily weather forecasts. We talked about transportation. We talked about

the airline sector, but, you know, farmers, water managers, people who work in agriculture. There are a lot of industries that rely on accurate forecasting. Is it possible to spin out whether accurate forecasting will exist?

And how it may or may not keep pace with extreme weather events over the spring and summer?

Well, I think every single industry on earth depends on accurate weather predictions, whether people who operate in those industries realize it or not. But also even just day to day, I think there's so much that goes on behind the scenes with electricity markets and heating and cooling and logistics and the distribution of goods getting, you know, you just getting from one place to another. I mean, just think about your own daily life.

in deciding what you're going to wear for the day. When am I going to leave for work? Is the bus going to be late? Is there going to be bad traffic on the freeway? Is my flight going to be delayed? And so it's everywhere, ubiquitously, whether we recognize it or not. And I think, in fact, it's so embedded in everything that it almost has become one of those things that is

truly indispensable and yet is often invisible precisely because it is so deeply integrated into everything we do every day. So, you know, I can't imagine that there's a future where we don't have weather forecasts in the U.S. I don't think that's

realistically what's going to happen if for no other reason than there's just such an extreme economic need for basic functionality of society. But could they become severely degraded and could they become degraded in a way that is preferentially problematic during destructive or extreme events? I think that's very much a possibility. Do we have do we stop having progress in improving weather predictions and understanding climate change?

On our current trajectory, that's very much a possibility. Do we cede leadership? Historically, you know, the United States was arguably the global leader in understanding the weather and climate and our global atmosphere. The U.S. is not the only country that tracks weather on a global scale.

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts provides this information and is supported by most countries in Europe. But what they don't have are specialized tornado and sea-root thunderstorm models for the U.S. Great Plains or specialized hurricane models for the Gulf Coast, like the Weather Service at NOAA does, because that's the kind of problems that we have in this particular country.

And, you know, that's not something that's necessarily in the interest of other countries to do a really good job predicting exactly whether a hurricane is going to make landfall near Houston or western Louisiana or whether a tornado outbreak is going to affect western Nebraska. That could go away, too. You know, there's a proposal to close a lot of these field offices and consolidate in a place like D.C., for example.

So there is much to be lost, even though, you know, I don't think it's the end of weather forecasting. I think that would be. But, you know, is it is it could it spell the end of American leadership in weather forecasting and climate prediction? It could. Could it mean that Americans have worse weather predictions and less reliable, severe weather warnings than we've become accustomed to and that our economy and our daily lives have sort of integrated and take for granted? I think that that is a distinct possibility on our current path.

I covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, and it is not lost on me that Atlantic hurricane season starts June 1st. Listening to you, it also sounds like Americans may die because of this. Is that going too far? Is that saying too much?

No, I don't think that's an exaggeration. Given the cuts that have already occurred, but especially given the cuts that appear to still be coming, the larger ones...

It is highly plausible that there will eventually be cases where people will die who didn't have to die, who would not have died were there a better prediction or a more timely warning or something like that. And it's difficult to predict exactly where and when, and we probably won't ever be able to quantify it exactly because, you know, in a particular severe weather event, unfortunately, even with the best forecast, sometimes there are still casualties. But it

It's very likely that as you start to degrade predictive capacity, if you have fewer observations upstream going into these predictive models to provide these forecasts, and if you then also have fewer personnel with their eyes glued to the radar screen, or if the radar screen is empty because the radar went down and there's no one available to fix it, which is, these are all examples of things that are actually happening right now.

That if they happen in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is becoming increasingly likely the longer these cuts persist or the deeper they become, then yes, that is likely to be an outcome eventually, as much as I hate to say it. If you are listening to this and you are scared or horrified and you don't know what to do, are there things you suggest?

I think this is one interesting area where despite the chaos and all the end rounds around the usual guardrails and the usual constraints to rapid shifts that are not approved by Congress,

There does appear to still be a very important role for public pressure in this. I know a lot of people have been in contact in their local Congress people, many of whom really just have not been aware in some cases. Some are more aware than others, but a lot of them have not been aware of the scope of the actual proposed cuts or why they're so critically important. And what is what is at stake? What is directly at stake? Like as soon as you know, the coming days and weeks potentially, you know,

And this has been true to my understanding, both in red and blue states and red and blue parts of red and blue states where there's just not a lot of understanding of the importance of the weather service.

The fact that it is essentially a world class public utility that, you know, of a quality that doesn't really exist in any other country. The U.S. has it and we're trying really hard to keep it. In many ways, it's the envy of the world in terms of meteorological services. So understanding that this is a case where there's already been some reversals of cuts

at least temporarily, on the basis essentially of public pressure. I think the diplomatic term being used by NOAA is an outpouring of public support, which is true, actually. But also what it really means is that a lot of people got angry and talked to the right people about it. The only silver lining I can think of to unilateral decision-making is that I suppose those decisions can be reversed quickly too. So I think that's one big piece of this is

Talk about it. Talk to your local and congressional representatives about what the value is, why it's so important to the economy, you know, why it's so important to protect the lives and the communities that you live in and care about and why it would just be massively inefficient and wasteful to get rid of this hugely effective and massively beneficial system that we've got.

Daniel Swain, as always, I'm really grateful for your time and thank you for coming on. Thanks again for having me back. Daniel Swain is a weather and climate scientist with the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. And that's it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Shana Roth, Patrick Fort, and Evan Campbell. Our show is edited by Rob Gunther.

Slate is run by Hilary Fry, and TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you're looking for even more Slate podcasts to listen to, you should subscribe to Slate+. You will get access to more TBD stories, including our special twice-a-month bonus episodes. Those are called The Discourse. All right, we'll be back next week with more episodes. I'm Lizzie O'Leary. Thanks for listening.

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