- The Trump administration let go hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Thursday.
- One of NOAA’s core functions is weather forecasting through the National Weather Service.
- Meteorologists say that the staff cuts will degrade weather forecasts and public safety.
Meteorologists are warning that weather forecasts will suffer as the Trump administration lays off hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“We will get it wrong a lot more frequently,” Ella Dorsey, a meteorologist for Atlanta News First, posted on X.
That’s because one of NOAA’s core functions is gathering weather data across the country, producing weather forecasts, and issuing warnings. The National Weather Service, National Hurricane Center, and National Tsunami Warning Center are all run by NOAA.
Your local weather station gets its data from the NWS. The weather app on your phone is using NWS forecasts. The Federal Aviation Administration relies on NWS meteorologists and data to route planes around storm systems.
“All of the widely consumed weather information through the private sector relies on this NOAA backbone,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist who specializes in California weather, said in a livestream on Thursday evening. “These are the people who prevent weather disasters from being much worse than they are in this country.”
A Trump administration official told Business Insider that 5% of NOAA’s staff was let go. With about 12,000 people working for the agency, that would be about 600 people let go. The official said that NWS meteorologists were largely spared.
When reached for confirmation, representatives of both NOAA and NWS declined to discuss personnel matters.
Meteorologists say lives are at stake
“Critical national public safety assets are being weakened,” Levi Cowan, who runs the hurricane forecast blog Tropical Tidbits, told Business Insider in an email. He said that would likely lead to “degraded services to the public.”
Cowan added that he worried an understaffed NOAA could lead to the discontinuation of datasets or reduced maintenance work on weather infrastructure that ultimately helps warn people in the path of life-threatening weather events.
Understaffed regional NWS field offices could also struggle to respond to weather events and coordinate with local emergency managers.
In an online post, Cowan called the layoffs “insane” and added that “Many of you reading this may knowingly or unknowingly be alive today because of their work, or know someone who is.”
Other meteorologists, like Ethan Clark of North Carolina’s Weather Authority, were even more direct.
“Let me be clear, people will die because of this,” Clark wrote on X.
The value of the National Weather Service
The NWS has had an annual budget of about $1.3 billion, give or take, for the last three years. That’s about $4 per taxpayer, according to Swain — the cost of a cup of coffee.
A recent report from the American Meteorological Society found that NWS weather forecasting produced a value of $102.1 billion in 2022. That’s about a 73-to-1 return on investment.
“Collectively they are one of, if not the best bang for your taxpayer buck out there,” Jim Cantore, a veteran meteorologist at The Weather Channel, wrote on X as rumors of impending layoffs churned earlier this week.
He was responding to another veteran meteorologist, James Spann, who had shared a post urging politicians to support the NWS.
“If NWS products and services are reduced, we all suffer… especially during times of life-threatening weather,” Spann wrote.
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