The president’s proposed budget for 2020 makes more than $75,000,000 in cuts to the National Weather Service that, if passed, could adversely affect the agency’s ability to keep the public safe during severe weather. The NWS is a force of nature that works tirelessly behind the scenes to warn every square inch of land in the United States when hazardous weather is on the way. Most Americans hardly realize how much they utilize the agency’s products and services until they’re under threat.
The National Weather Service occasionally faces political pressure due to the mistaken belief that private weather companies could pick up the slack of a reduced NWS and provide the same services the federal agency does. Contrary to those assertions, private companies would find themselves lost without the critical services and infrastructure provided by the NWS. Most of the observational data, weather radar imagery, and much of the weather modelling used by private weather companies is maintained by the federal government. It’d be prohibitively expensive for each company to foot the bill for these services on their own.
Upper-air observations would lose $2,271,000 of funding under the proposed budget. These observations, taken by instruments attached to weather balloons, collect information on temperature, moisture, wind, and air pressure as they ascend to the top of the atmosphere. Weather balloons only ever come up in everyday conversation as the butt of a UFO joke, but these upper-air soundings are critically important to the accuracy of weather models. The use of upper-air observations taken by airplanes flying over oceans would also be slashed under the proposed budget. Data collected by airplanes flying over remote areas help forecasters fill in the gaps where we don't have weather balloons.
The data collected by weather balloons is ingested into weather models to “initialize” them, or tell them what the atmosphere is doing right now. A weather model needs to know what the atmosphere looks like right now so that it can paint a more accurate picture of what it thinks could happen in the future. The NWS releases weather balloons more frequently ahead of a high-impact severe weather event like a tornado outbreak or a landfalling hurricane so that weather models have even more data to work with. Reducing the geographic extent and frequency of weather balloon launches would feed less data into weather models, potentially making it harder for models to produce accurate guidance for forecasters.
A $12,500,000 reduction in surface-based observation stations would also reduce the ability for forecasters to see what's happening on the ground as it happens. Most of the cuts would come from the National Mesonet Program, which supports dozens of mesonets across the country. A mesonet is a small-scale, densely-populated network of weather stations that gives us a good view of current conditions across a relatively small area. The most well-known mesonet is the Oklahoma Mesonet, which consists of at least one weather station in each county in Oklahoma. The type of ground truth provided by mesonets is important—when a station records a severe wind gust as a thunderstorm passes overhead, it lets forecasters issue advanced warning to communities in the path of the storm. Rainfall data collected by mesonets also helps meteorologists monitor and study flooding rain events.
More than 300 National Weather Service employees would stand to lose their jobs if the proposed cuts are adopted. Nearly 250 meteorologists and more than 70 IT professionals would be laid off as part of a workforce adjustment based on an analysis conducted several years ago. Understaffing at NWS offices across the country has been a pressing issue for years, made even more serious by hiring freezes and funding cuts.
The budget also proposes the end of VORTEX-SE, a tornado research program aimed at helping meteorologists better understand how and why thunderstorms in the southeastern United States produce tornadoes. The conditions that lead to tornadic storms in the southeast are different from the tornadic environments you'd see in a state like Kansas or Oklahoma. VORTEX-SE ventures into tornado outbreaks in the southeast and studies the environment with sensors, mobile radars, and upper-air soundings—a vital research effort that will help forecasters issue better tornado forecasts in the future.
It’s unlikely that these cuts will become law given the split-party control of government in Washington. Leading Democrats on the House subcommittee that oversees NOAA were critical of proposed cuts to the agency in a hearing with the acting NOAA Administrator last week.
