Over the next few months, you might notice weather forecasts becoming less accurate.
Freezing rain when you were expecting snow. Thunderstorms that are more severe than predicted. Maybe a tornado passes through your town without your phone ever warning you.
But it won’t be because the weather itself is becoming less predictable. It’s because the Trump administration is eliminating nearly 2,500 jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
NOAA collects the data meteorologists rely on to model weather patterns and forecast storms. And that includes the weather app on your phone.
“The more data you have, the sooner you can get that warning out and help protect people,” said Janice Bunting, the CEO of the National Weather Association. “But if you don’t have that data or you’re missing big gaps in data, it’s scary to think about what could happen.”
Former NOAA officials told the Associated Press the layoffs and firings — which along with buyouts will reduce staffing by 20% — will put lives at risk.
Meteorologists say that NOAA plays a critical role in collecting data, forecasting and notifying the public of weather emergencies like tornadoes, wildfires and snow storms.
And they have serious concerns that these cuts could not only affect weather research but also leave people across the country in the dark about dangerous storms and weather emergencies.
Nearly one in five employees has departed from the NOAA
NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service, has been hit with three waves of job cuts.
The first was the firing of nearly 900 “probationary employees” at the end of February. Those are workers who have held their current job for less than two years. That includes longtime employees who recently earned a promotion.
They “may have been employees for 25 years and just recently got a promotion,” KMBC chief meteorologist Bryan Busby told The Beacon. “But because they’ve been in that job for less than two years, they’re in the category of being expendable. So there goes 25 years of experience and expertise and knowledge out the door.”
A federal judge ruled on Thursday that similar firings of probationary employees at other agencies was illegal, and ordered the White House to reinstate those workers. But that doesn’t include the NOAA employees who were fired on Feb. 27.
The second wave was another 500 employees who took a voluntary buyout. Those workers were told that they could stop working now and keep being paid through September.
The third and most recent wave was announced on March 11 and includes another 1,029 NOAA employees.
All told, about 2,400 employees have left the NOAA since the end of February. That represents nearly 20% of the agency’s 13,000 employees.
It’s unclear how many of those departures are National Weather Service employees, but the NWS union told Politico that about 7% of its employees were let go in that first wave of probationary employee firings.
A NOAA representative declined to tell The Beacon whether those layoffs directly affected the NWS office in Pleasant Hill, Missouri, which collects weather data for the Kansas City area.
What the National Weather Service does
NOAA employees do a range of jobs, including studying tornadoes and hurricanes, mapping the coasts, helping ships navigate polar ice and operating satellites.
Many of its employees — nearly 5,000 people — work at the National Weather Service, or NWS.
That includes meteorologists and forecasters, as well as technicians to maintain and repair the agency’s massive network of radars, buoys and weather balloons.
Bunting, who now heads the National Weather Association, formerly worked at the NWS office in Pleasant Hill. She said offices across the country are staffed around the clock to have meteorologists watching the radars, communicating with airports and nearby cities, sending emergency notifications when there’s severe weather and launching weather balloons to collect data.
All of that work across 122 local forecast offices in the country contributes to a nationwide database that’s available to news stations, meteorologists, private companies and any member of the public, free of charge.
In severe weather events, such as thunderstorms, tornadoes, flash floods, droughts and wildfires, the NWS also issues warnings and watches to the public.
Think back to the winter storm that slammed Kansas City at the beginning of January.
The weather balloons released by NWS offices — including the one in Topeka — measured the temperature, wind, humidity and air pressure at the ground and at different layers of the atmosphere.
Meteorologists knew that precipitation would be coming, but those weather balloons helped them figure out whether different cities would see more snow, sleet or freezing rain depending on how much warm air was in the atmosphere.
That information told government officials that they needed to pretreat the roads with salt, making sure that essential workers like doctors, firefighters and utility repair technicians could get to work.
But since the job cuts were announced, some NWS offices across the country have already canceled some of their operations, including weather balloon launches.
Meteorologists rely heavily on National Weather Service data
The Beacon sat down with Busby, a meteorologist at KMBC 9 News, and Wes Peery, a meteorologist at KSHB 41, to learn how they use NWS data in their forecasts.
They use it at every turn.
When you see a map on local news, that’s sourced from NWS radar data.
When you see temperatures on a five-day forecast, that’s based on the NWS forecast (with modifications based on each meteorologist’s interpretation of the data).
When a map shows rain or snow totals, or counties shaded in with a severe weather watch, that information is directly imported from the NWS.
“Everything branches off from them — the weather balloons, the satellites that we look at, the radars,” Busby said. “It’s a huge net, and all of those different pieces of the puzzle help me figure out the forecast.”
Peery pulled up a dozen websites to explain all of the ways that meteorologists pull apart the data provided by the NWS.
Weather balloon data — collected by the NWS — can help him figure out how severe a thunderstorm will be. The NWS gives him a set of high and low temperatures for the next 10 days, which he checks against a variety of other forecasting models. He reads detailed weather alerts from different offices at the NWS about droughts, flooding or wind.
During severe weather events, meteorologists across Kansas City can talk directly with the forecasters at the NWS offices across the country using a shared Slack channel.
“We’re constantly in contact with the National Weather Service during pretty much all types of eventful weather,” Peery said. “I could be doing the 5 o’clock news, but there’s someone at the NWS office, sometimes multiple people dedicated to watching storms on radar, constantly looking at different levels of the storm, to see if it’s rotating.”
And if the NWS meteorologists issue a tornado warning, that gets broadcast on nearly every TV station in the area.
The future of the National Weather Service
Many meteorologists, including Bunting and Busby, are deeply concerned about what the layoffs could mean for weather forecasting in the future.
“Everybody wants to eliminate waste and wasteful spending as much as possible,” Busby said. “My feeling is, it’s better to do it with a scalpel as opposed to a machete.”
Cuts to the NWS will create holes in weather data. That makes forecasting models less accurate, especially when they look further into the future.
That’s a problem in a place like Kansas City, which has some of the least predictable weather among the most populated metropolitan areas in the country.
And people lose money when they lack reliable weather forecasts — cars damaged on icy roads or during unexpected hailstorms, medical expenses for injuries, property lost in wildfires or canceled work and school days.
Staffing problems at the National Weather Service may be getting worse, but they are not entirely new, Bunting said.
The NWS office in Pleasant Hill, for example, has had four vacant positions (nearly a third of their 13-person forecasting staff) for more than a month, according to an archived version of their staff page. That predates the firings and layoffs that started at the end of February.
The NWS Pleasant Hill office declined to comment for this story, directing The Beacon to contact the NOAA directly.
“The weather service staff has been very good at covering situations where they’re low staff,” Bunting said. “But I fear they’re getting to a critical point where they may not be able to do that as well as they did in the past.”
It can be a brutal job, with long overnight shifts to keep the office staffed 24/7. And if the office loses more employees to burnout, that will make it more difficult to replace them.
“When you’re not able to get the rest you need,” Bunting said, “and you may be faced with multiple days or weeks of episodes of either hurricanes or severe weather, it does take a toll.”
Busby said he hopes that decision makers could change course when faced with pressure from everyday people.
“There’s already been some backlash,” he said. “If your voice is heard, eventually it will have to get to the lawmakers that their constituents aren’t happy. And maybe if there’s enough of a tidal wave of concern (it can) maybe slow down the process.”
Weather impacts everyone, he said. And that means it’s something that helps people relate to others who may not agree on other issues.
“It’s not by mistake that total strangers can find common ground talking about the weather because it affects us all,” he said. “So why in God’s name would you want to cut any funding and make it more difficult to stay ahead of Mother Nature?”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
