US weather forecasting in worse shape than experts knew after Trump cuts: report
ABC News reported this week that the U.S. experienced a multi-state tornado outbreak, impacting millions of people. However, behind the scenes of the world of weather forecasters, things are far worse than previously known.
CNN reported Friday that the drastic budget and staff cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS) have left a skeleton crew to handle the nation's forecasting agency.
The report pointed out that there are concerns this year "could be a destructive hurricane season."
Meteorologists told CNN that they're concerned "forecasts and life-saving warnings" won't be put out in a timely way.
"Responsible for protecting life and property from severe weather impacts, the National Weather Service is headed into hurricane season with 30 of its 122 weather forecast offices lacking their most experienced official, known as the meteorologist-in-charge," the report explained.
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There are major offices in New York City, Cleveland, Houston and Tampa that navigate hurricane-specific forecasting. The report details 30 National Weather Service offices that no longer have a chief meteorologist working in them.
After the cuts, "there is not a single manager in place at the hurricane-prone Houston-Galveston forecast office, according to a NOAA staff member who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal."
The Houston office in particular was the main source of forecasting during Hurricane Harvey, which killed at least 68 people in the Houston metro area in 2017, the report recalled.
Other offices do daily weather balloon launches, but after the cuts, many have stopped and "more are likely to follow suit following a wave of early retirements taking place this week," one NOAA employee told CNN. The balloons help with creating computer models for forecasters to predict whether the weather will be severe or not.
As Raw Story reported in February, there are often more staff working for NOAA and NWS because they watch the weather 24/7 to ensure that if there are storms overnight, those warnings are issued and alerts can still go out.
In Goodland, Kansas, the NWS forecast office will no longer have a 24/7 shift, the report said. There were about a dozen other forecast offices that will also stop doing 24/7 monitoring. Many of those offices are in the Plains states, said CNN.
Already in 2025, from April 2nd-7th, tornadoes ripped through towns overnight, the NWS charted. At the end of April, another outbreak in Iowa and Minnesota also saw after-dark tornadoes, CBS News reported.
A 2022 study led by Stephen Strader from Villanova University looked at 140 years of tornado history and found that fatalities that come from them increase by 20% at night.
"Since 1880, nearly 34% of all tornado fatalities occurred at night, but that percentage has increased to 38% during the past 30 years. explained that the tornadoes that strike at night are more deadly," the report said, according to the Weather Channel.
CNN said that having un-monitored forecast offices "is virtually unheard of in the absence of an extreme weather event, such as a hurricane or tornado, that either threatens the lives of the forecasters themselves or knocks them offline."
The budget and staff cuts are part of President Donald Trump's ongoing effort to eliminate "waste, fraud and abuse" in government.
