June 5, 20253 min readNew Hires Will Still Leave the NWS Dangerously Understaffed, Meteorologists SayNearly 600 employees left the National Weather Service or were fired in recent months. Meteorologists say 125 expected new hires will still leave the agency dangerously understaffedBy Chelsea Harvey & E&E News A tornado struck communities in Somerset and London, Ky., on May 16, 2025, leaving 19 dead and more injured. Michael Swensen/Getty ImagesCLIMATEWIRE | New hiring efforts at the National Weather Service won’t be enough to overcome staffing shortages and potential risks to human lives this summer, meteorologists warned Wednesday at a panel hosted by Democratic Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell.NOAA will hire around 125 new employees at the NWS, the agency said in an announcement first reported Monday by CNN. But nearly 600 employees have departed the NWS over the last few months, after the Trump administration fired probationary federal employees and offered buyouts and early retirements.That means the new hires will account for less than 25 percent of the total losses.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.“A quarter of the staff are not going to do the job when, let’s just say, both hurricane and fire risks are increasing,” Cantwell said during Wednesday’s panel. “approach in response to this has been a flimsy Band-Aid over a very massive cut.”Cantwell added that the National Hurricane Center is not fully staffed, as NOAA officials suggested last month when announcing their predictions for the upcoming Atlantic hurricane season outlook. The NHC has at least five vacancies, she said, representing meteorologists and technicians who help build forecasts for tropical cyclones in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.Meanwhile, NOAA is predicting above-average activity in the Atlantic this hurricane season. Updated fire maps also suggest that nearly all of Cantwell’s home state of Washington, along with Oregon and large swaths of California, will experience an above-average risk of wildfires by August.Kim Doster, NOAA’s director of communications, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on NOAA’s staffing shortages or the NHC’s vacancies.Three meteorologists speaking on the panel echoed Cantwell’s concerns, suggesting that staffing shortages at weather offices across the country risk forecasting errors and breakdowns in communication between meteorologists and emergency managers.At least eight local weather offices across the country are currently so short-staffed that they can no longer cover their overnight shifts, said Brian LaMarre, a former meteorologist-in-charge at the NWS office in Tampa Bay, Florida. Some of these offices may have to rely on “mutual aid,” or borrowed staff, from other NWS locations to cover their shifts during extreme weather events.But Cantwell and other panelists expressed concern that staff-sharing across the NWS could erode the accuracy of forecasts and warnings for local communities.Cantwell pointed to the meteorologists that specialize in fire weather forecasts. NOAA typically deploys those experts to provide forecasts and recommendations to firefighters on the ground when wildfires strike.“If you think you're gonna substitute somebody that’s gonna be somewhere else — I don’t know where, some other part of the state or some other state — and you think you're gonna give them accurate weather information? It just doesn't work that way,” she said.Washington state-based broadcast meteorologist Jeff Renner echoed her concerns.“The meteorologists that respond tohave very specific training and very specific experience that can’t be easily duplicated, particularly from those outside the area,” he said.Meanwhile, LaMarre’s former position in Tampa is vacant, and around 30 other offices across the country are also operating without a permanent meteorologist-in-charge.“That person is the main point of contact when it comes to briefing elected officials, emergency management directors, state governors, city mayors, parish officials,” LaMarre said. “They are the individual that’s gonna be implementing any new change that is needed for hurricane season, blizzards, wildfires, inland flooding.”The NWS suffered from staffing shortages prior to the Trump administration. But LaMarre said he never saw such widespread vacancies, including offices unable to operate overnight, in his 30 years at the agency.He emphasized that NWS meteorologists will do whatever it takes to ensure accurate forecasts when extreme weather strikes. But too many gaps at local offices mean that some services will inevitably suffer, LaMarre added.“Whenever you look at an office that is short-staffed, that means a piece of that larger puzzle is taken away,” he said. “That means some outreach might not be able to occur. Some trainings might not be able to occur. Some briefings to officials might not be able to occur.”Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. #new #nws #hires #wont #make

May 30, 20252 min readSahara Dust Clouds Are Heading to Florida and BeyondClouds of dust blown off the Saharan Desert into the southeastern U.S. could affect local weather and make sunrises and sunsets particularly vividBy Meghan Bartels edited by Dean VisserEach year, seasonal winds carry tens of millions of tons of Saharan dust across the Atlantic and beyond. On February 18, 2021, NOAA-20’s VIIRS captured a dramatic display of airborne dust. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting PartnershipClouds of dust drifting from the Sahara Desert over the Atlantic Ocean could make for unusual-looking sunrises and sunsets, as well as potentially drier weather, over Florida and parts of the southeastern U.S. in the coming days.What’s HappeningBetween late spring and early fall, dust from the Saharan gets blown out over the Atlantic Ocean every three to five days. When conditions are right, air masses that are filled with this dust can make it across the thousands of miles required to reach North America. Meteorologists call this type of air mass the Saharan Air Layer, or SAL.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Currently, on Friday, a thin SAL is dispersing over Florida, says Ana Torres-Vazquez, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Miami office, who adds that this could interfere with some storms carried into the peninsula by a cold front on Saturday. Another layer of dust—this one thicker and denser—may then blow in next week, although that forecast is currently less certain, Torres-Vazquez notes.It’s worth noting that the Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1. In general, the SAL tends to dry the atmosphere it drifts through—so some scientists think these dust clouds may actually impede hurricane development. For now, however, forecasters aren’t expecting any tropical storms to develop in the Atlantic within the coming week.Sunrise, SunsetThe effect that will be most noticeable to local residents as the dust lingers might be unusual sunrises and sunsets.“When you have Saharan dust or any other kind of particulate, if the sun is coming in at an angle, like during sunrise or sunset,” Torres-Vazquez says, “it can hit those particulates that are close to the ground just right and result in those different, kind of orangey-reddish colors.”Other parts of the country might also see enhanced sunrises and sunsets during the coming days from a different kind of particulate—wildfire smoke. Canada is experiencing yet another brutal year for wildfires, with nearly 700,000 hectares, or more than 2,500 square miles, burned to date.Right now fires are particularly bad in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in part because of high temperatures stuck over central Canada. Smoke from these blazes is expected to reach U.S. states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan, in the coming days.Depending on how close the dust and smoke get to Earth’s surface, these kinds of particulate matter can be harmful to people’s health, particularly for people who are very young or very old and those who have asthma or heart or lung disease. The Air Quality Index can help you gauge whether you should take any precautions. #sahara #dust #clouds #are #heading

May 30, 20255 min readWhy This Hurricane Season Has Experts on EdgePredictions for an above-average number of storms, communities that are still recovering and cuts to the National Weather Service have meteorologists and other experts worried about this hurricane seasonBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean VisserCategory 4 Hurricane Florence as seen from the International Space Station in 2018. ESA/NASA–A. GerstJune 1 marks the official start of the hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean—and once again, the season looks like it will be busy.Though it is impossible to tell this far in advance exactly when storms will form and where they might hit, the presence of hurricane-friendly environmental conditions this season—along with the federal government cuts and policy chaos—have experts worried about the accuracy of forecasts and the resulting safety of communities. Scientific American asked several forecasters and hurricane researchers what they were most concerned about this year.Warm oceans may mean a busy hurricane seasonOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Seasonal forecasts—including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s—put the odds in favor of having more storms than average this season, which will last until November 30. NOAA predicts 13 to 19 named storms, meaning those of tropical storm strengthor higher. Of those, six to 10 are expected to become hurricanes. And among those hurricanes, three to five are expected to reach major hurricane status—meaning they will have winds that will fall within Category 3or a stronger category on the Saffir-Simpson scale.The expectations of an active season arise from a combination of a favorable atmospheric environment and abundant ocean heat to fuel storms. For one thing, there’s no El Niño in place right now to influence winds in a way that tends to shred storms apart, says Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University, whose team releases its own seasonal forecast each year.And waters in the Gulf of Mexico are extremely warm right now, providing ample fuel for the convection that drives tropical cyclones. “Over 60 percent of the Gulf is at record or near-record warmth for the time of year, and waters east of Florida and around the Bahamas are as warm as we’ve seen them for the start of any hurricane season in the satellite era,” says Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist at WPLG Local 10 News in Miami. Warm ocean water in these areas can cause storms to rapidly intensify right before landfall, giving communities less time to prepare for the onslaught. This is a major concern for Jill Trepanier, a hurricane researcher at Louisiana State University. “That is just a devastating situation when it occurs,” she says.It’s a situation that has played out many times in recent years, including with Hurricanes Beryl and Milton last season. “The sticky heat of the Gulf is a worrisome trend that’s undoubtedly fueling the spate of big hurricane hits along the Gulf Coast over the past decade or so,” Lowry says. “This is consistent with recent research that suggests the Gulf has seen a significant increase over the past 42 years in the number of days where it can support high-end hurricanes.”Because of that abundant hurricane fuel, “I would not be surprised if we see early-season activity well ahead of the peak” of activity in September, says Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia.Several experts noted that this year’s conditions have some slight differences from the most recent seasons. For one, “the waters of the deep tropical Atlantic east of the Caribbean—often a bellwether for overall hurricane season activity—are the coolest we’ve seen them to start a hurricane season since 2021,” Lowry says. But, he adds, they are “still plenty warm ... and forecast to remain so, which should favor above-average activity.”Though the overall message is that this will be a busier-than-normal season, it is not predicted to be quite as busy as those of the past few years. Klotzbach is worried that could lead to complacency. “My biggest concern is that, because the seasonal forecasts are a bit less aggressive than last year..., people may tend to let their guard down,” he says.Communities are still recoveringInevitably, each time a new hurricane season begins, some communities are still reeling from storms from the previous year—and often even further back in time. This year “places in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas are still recovering from Helene, Milton and Debby,” Shepherd says, citing three of the worst storms of the 2024 season.An aerial view of destroyed houses in Port St Lucie, Fla., after a tornado hit the area and caused severe damage as Hurricane Milton swept through on October 11, 2024.Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty ImagesA National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report released last year warned that the Gulf Coast in particular risked being in “perpetual disaster recovery” mode. The report noted that seven hurricanes struck the region in 2020 and 2021 alone.It’s entirely possible that some of the communities pummeled in recent years could face hurricane peril again this year. “With projections of average to above-average activity, all it takes is one storm to compound an already bad situation for many people,” Marshall says.NWS and FEMA cutsPiled atop these concerns is the situation within the federal government, with substantial budget and staffing cuts to the National Weather Serviceand the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It remains to be seen what the impacts of reduced staffing across relevant NOAA offices and agencies will be,” says Brian McNoldy, a tropical storm researcher at the University of Miami. “But any loss of expertise, data collection capabilities and around-the-clock monitoring is troubling during critical, high-impact situations.”Though the National Hurricane Centermonitors the development of tropical storms and hurricanes and produces the main forecasts, local NWS offices still play a crucial role in providing more localized warnings about storm surge, flooding and winds. Many offices in hurricane-prone areas are understaffed, says Jeff Masters, a writer at Yale Climate Connections and a former Hurricane Hunter at NOAA. Among those, the NWS’s Houston and Miami offices are suffering the largest staff shortages. The NWS has asked staff from other offices to move into some of these open slots.Lowry and Masters also point out that the cuts have reduced the number of weather balloons launches. Balloon data are crucial for understanding the larger atmospheric patterns that determine where a hurricane will go—and who might need to evacuate or take other precautions.There is one positive note: “I was very pleased to see the Hurricane Hunters reinstated,” Trepanier says, referring to three of the meteorologists who fly specialized, equipment-laden planes directly into storms to gather data that significantly improve forecasts. “Though it isn't enough to offset the concern, it is a move in a good direction.”James Franklin, former chief of the NHC’s Hurricane Specialist Unit, says he is concerned about trainings for emergency managers that were canceled earlier this year Their absence could leave areas less prepared and less able to know what decisions to make based on forecasts. “When training has to be cut down…, it just makes those kinds of mistakes on the emergency management side more likely to occur,” he says.Finally, another big worry is simply the government’s ability to respond with help for victims when a storm hits. Masters’ biggest worry is that FEMA won't “be capable of managing a major disaster right now.”Reports by CNN and other news outlets have cited internal FEMA memos that report the loss of 30 percent of full-time staff. “I wrote the plan FEMA uses to respond to hurricanes,” says Lowry, a former employee of both the NHC and FEMA, “and it’s hard to imagine the agency will be able to meet its mission-critical functions this season with such depleted staffing and without a fully revised plan.” #with #busy #hurricane #season #forecast

May 30, 20256 min readInside the Lifesaving Power of Doppler Weather RadarDoppler radar is one of the most revolutionary and lifesaving tools of modern meteorology, which has experts worried about outages because of recent staffing cuts and conspiracy theoriesBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean Visser Mfotophile/Getty ImagesOutside every National Weather Serviceoffice around the U.S. stands what looks like an enormous white soccer ball, perched atop metal scaffolding several stories high. These somewhat plain spheres look as ho-hum as a town water tower, but tucked inside each is one of modern meteorology’s most revolutionary and lifesaving tools: Doppler radar.The national network of 160 high-resolution radars, installed in 1988 and updated in 2012, sends out microwave pulses that bounce off raindrops or other precipitation to help forecasters see what is falling and how much—providing crucial early information about events ranging from flash floods to blizzards. And the network is especially irreplaceable when it comes to spotting tornadoes; it has substantially lengthened warning times and reduced deaths. Doppler radar has “really revolutionized how we’ve been able to issue warnings,” says Ryan Hanrahan, chief meteorologist of the NBC Connecticut StormTracker team.But now meteorologists and emergency managers are increasingly worried about what might happen if any of these radars go offline, whether because of cuts to the NWS made by the Trump administration or threats from groups that espouse conspiracy theories about the radars being used to control the weather. “Losing radar capabilities would “take us back in time by four decades,” says Jana Houser, a tornado researcher at the Ohio State University. If they go down, “there’s no way we’re going to be effective at storm warnings.”On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.How Doppler radars workThe NWS installations form a network called the Next Generation Weather Radar, or NEXRAD. Inside each giant white sphere is a device that looks like a larger version of a home satellite TV dish, with a transmitter that emits pulses in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Those pulses bounce off raindrops, snowflakes, hailstones—what meteorologists collectively call hydrometeors—and back to the dish antenna.Amanda MontañezThe power of the returning signals lets experts create a picture of size, shape and intensity of any precipitation—and this is what you see on a phone app’s radar map or a TV broadcast.But NEXRAD can do much, much more than show how hard it’s raining. Within its sphere, each unit rotates and scans up and down through the sky, helping forecasters see what is happening at multiple levels of a storm system. These vertical profiles can show, for example, whether a tornado is forming or a storm is creating a downburst—a rapid downward blast of wind. “Doppler radar basically allows us to see in the clouds,” Hanrahan says.And then there’s the “Doppler” part itself. The name refers to a phenomenon that’s familiar to many, thanks to the electromagnetic waves’ acoustic counterpart. We’ve all experienced this, often most obviously when we hear an emergency vehicle siren pass nearby: the pitch increases as the car gets closer and decreases as it moves away. Similarly, the returning radar bounce from a rain droplet or piece of tornadic debris that is moving toward the emitter will have a shorter wavelength than the pulse that was sent out, and the signal from an object moving away from the radar will have a longer wavelength. This allows the radar to efficiently distinguish the tight circulation of a tornado.These two images show how dual-polarization helps NWS forecasters detect a tornado that is producing damage. The left image shows how the Doppler radar can detect rotation. Between the two yellow arrows, the red color indicates outbound wind, while the green color indicate inbound wind, relative to the location of the radar. The right image shows how dual-polarization information helps detect debris picked up by the tornado.NOAAThe nation’s radar system was upgraded in 2012 to include what is called dual polarization. This means the signal has both vertically and horizontally oriented wavelengths, providing information about precipitation in more than one dimension. “A drizzle droplet is almost perfectly spherical, so it returns the same amount of power in the horizontal and in the vertical,” Hanrahan says, whereas giant drops look almost like “hamburger buns” and so send back more power in the horizontal than the vertical.Are Doppler radars dangerous? Can they affect the weather?Doppler radars do not pose any danger to people, wildlife or structures—and they cannot affect the weather.Along the electromagnetic spectrum, it is the portions with shorter wavelengths such as gamma rays and ultraviolet radiation that can readily damage the human body—because their wavelengths are the right size to interact with and damage DNA or our cells. Doppler radars emit pulses in wavelengths about the size of a baseball.Amanda MontañezBeing hit by extremely concentrated microwave radiation could be harmful; this is why microwave ovens have mesh screens that keep the rays from escaping. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to stand directly in front of a radar microwave beam. Military radar technicians found this out years ago when working on radars under operation, University of California, Los Angeles, climate scientist Daniel Swain said during one of his regular YouTube talks. They “had experiences like the candy bar in their pocket instantly melting and then feeling their skin getting really hot,” he said.Similar to how a microwave oven works, when the microwave signal from a radar hits a hydrometeor, the water molecules vibrate and so generate heat because of friction and reradiate some of the received energy, says Cynthia Fay, who serves as a focal point for the National Weather Service’s Radar Operations Center. But “microwave radiation is really not very powerful, and the whole point is that if you stand more than a couple dozen feet away from the dome it's not even really going to affect your body, let alone the global atmosphere,” Swain adds.At the radar’s antenna, the average power is about 23.5 megawattsof energy, Fay says.But the energy from the radar signal dissipates very rapidly with distance: at just one kilometer from the radar, the power is 0.0000019 MW, and at the radar’s maximum range of 460 kilometers, it is 8.8 x 10–12 MW, Fay says. “Once you’re miles away, it’s just really not a dangerous amount” of energy, Swain said in his video.A supercell thunderstorm that produced an F4 tornado near Meriden, KS, in May 1960, as seen from the WSR-3 radar in Topeka. A supercell thunderstorm that produced an EF5 tornado in Moore, OK, in May 2013, as seen from a modern Doppler weather radar near Oklahoma City.NOAAAnd Doppler radars spend most of their time listening for returns. According to the NWS, for every hour of operation, a radar may spend as little as seven seconds sending out pulses.The idea that Doppler radar can control or affect the weather is “a long-standing conspiracythat has existed really for decades but has kind of accelerated in recent years,” Swain said in his video. It has resurfaced recently with threats to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration radar system from an antigovernment militia group, as first reported by CNN. The Washington Post reported that the group’s founder said that its members were carrying out “attack simulations” on sites in order to later destroy the radars,—which the group believes are “weather weapons,” according to an internal NOAA e-mail. NOAA has advised radar technicians at the NWS’s offices to exercise caution and work in teams when going out to service radars—and to notify local law enforcement of any suspicious activity.“NOAA is aware of recent threats against NEXRAD weather radar sites and is working with local and other authorities in monitoring the situation closely,” wrote a NWS spokesperson in response to a request for comment from Scientific American.What happens if weather radars go offline?NOAA’s radars have been on duty for 24 hours a day, seven days a week and 365 days a year since 1988. “It’s amazing what workhorses these radars have been,” Hanrahan says.The image on the left shows a reflectivity radar image of a supercell thunderstorm that produced several tornadoes on April 19, 2023, near Oklahoma City, OK. The hook shape present often indicates rotation within the storm. The image on the right show velocity information that corresponds to the reflectivity image. Very strong inbound windsare next to very strong outbound winds. This very strong inbound/outbound “couplet” indicates the very strong rotation of a tornado.NOAABut they do require that periodic maintenance because of all the large moving parts needed to operate them. And with Trump administration cuts to NOAA staffing and freezes on some spending, “we just got rid of a lot of the radar maintenance technicians, and we got rid of the budget to repair a lot of these sites,” Swain said in his video. “Most of these are functioning fine right now. The question is: What happens once they go down, once they need a repair?”It is this outage possibility that most worries weather experts, particularly if the breakdowns occur during any kind of severe weather. “Radars are key instruments in issuing tornado warnings,” the Ohio State University’s Houser says. “If a radar goes down, we’re basically down as to what the larger picture is.”And for much of the country—particularly in the West—there is little to no overlap in the areas that each radar covers, meaning other sites would not be able to step in if a neighboring radar is out. Hanrahan says the information provided by the radars is irreplaceable, and the 2012 upgrades mean “we don’t even need to have eyes on a tornado now to know that it’s happening. It’s something that I think we take for granted now.” #how #doppler #radar #lets #meteorologists

May 23, 20255 min readNOAA Says It’s Ready for Hurricane Season, but Weather Experts Are WorriedAs hurricane season approaches, thousands of weather and disaster experts have raised concerns about NOAA and NWS budget cuts and staffing shortagesBy Chelsea Harvey & E&E News The remnants of Hurricane Helene begin to dissipate over the United States in this NOAA satellite from Sept. 27, 2024. Space Image Archive/Alamy Stock PhotoCLIMATEWIRE | The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration insists it’s ready for the above-average hurricane season that meteorologists expect this summer.But scientists across the country are sounding the alarm about personnel shortages and budget cuts, which they say could strain the agency’s resources and risk burnout among its staff.The tension was on display Thursday as NOAA officials announced the agency’s annual Atlantic hurricane season outlook.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.This year’s projection suggests a 60 percent chance of an above-average season, with anywhere from 13 to 19 named storms and three to five major hurricanes. That’s compared with the long term average of 14 named storms and three major hurricanes in a typical season.NOAA hosted this year’s announcement in Gretna, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, in a nod to the upcoming 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city in 2005. The agency has made significant strides in hurricane forecasts and warnings over the past two decades, officials said — including life-saving improvements in hurricane track and intensity predictions and new forms of modeling, radar and observation technology.“These improvements and collaborative efforts demonstrate that NOAA is now more prepared than ever for what hurricane season may bring,” said NOAA chief of staff Laura Grimm.But reporters at the briefing pushed back on that certainty, noting that recent cuts have eroded some of the agency’s observation capabilities and left dozens of local National Weather Service offices understaffed.Thousands of scientists have raised the same concerns over the past few months, as the Trump administration has reduced NOAA staff by more than 2,200 people, or around 20 percent of its former workforce. The administration also has proposed a plan to dramatically reorganize the agency and effectively eliminate its climate research operations.The National Weather Service alone has lost around 550 staff members since January, leaving the agency scrambling to fill at least 155 key job openings at regional offices around the country; some include top positions such as meteorologist-in-charge.At least 3,300 scientists have signed an open letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who leads the department that oversees NOAA, warning that cuts to the agency could have “dire consequences for American lives and livelihoods.”And earlier this month, five former National Weather Service directors published an open letter warning that the recent cuts mean NWS staff members face “an impossible task” when it comes to maintaining their usual level of service.Volunteers work to remove debris and mud from a flooded home on Edwards Avenue in Beacon Village neighborhood after a catastrophic flooding caused from Hurricane Helene caused the Swannanoa river to swell to record levels October 5, 2024 in Swannanoa, North Carolina.Steve Exum/Getty Images“Some forecast offices will be so short-staffed that they may be forced to go to part time services,” the letter warned. “Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”NOAA officials sidestepped these worries at Thursday's presentation, insisting the National Hurricane Center’s headquarters is fully staffed and prepared for the upcoming season.“We had some folks go,” said National Weather Service director Ken Graham. “But we’re gonna make sure that we have everything that we have on the front lines. Every warning’s gonna go out.”It remains unclear how the agency plans to address the dozens of vacancies at local offices across the country, including some hurricane-prone areas along the East and Gulf coasts. Lawmakers have reported that NOAA managers are encouraging staff members to pursue reassignments to understaffed offices, while the former NWS directors noted that staff members have been known to sleep in their offices to avoid gaps in coverage.That scenario played out recently at a regional office in Jackson, Kentucky, that is so understaffed that it’s no longer able to regularly operate overnight. When deadly tornadoes struck the region earlier this month, meteorologists there made the decision to call all hands on deck to staff the overnight shift and ensure the quality of forecasts and warnings, CNN reported.But experts say it’s an unsustainable system, which could lead to burnout this summer when disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires are at their peak.“It’s not sustainable if we have multiple high-impact weather events,” said Brian LaMarre, a former meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s Tampa Bay Area office and founder of the weather consulting service Inspire Weather. “It doesn't matter if we’re forecasting above normal or below normal, it only takes that one storm to truly make a significant impact.”Risks rise with global temperaturesMeanwhile, Atlantic hurricane seasons are expected to grow more intense as global temperatures rise.This year’s projections for an active season are partly linked to above-average ocean temperatures, which help fuel the formation of tropical cyclones. This year’s temperatures aren’t as warm as they were the past two seasons, when ocean waters broke daily records for more than a year. But they’re still warm enough to cause concern.Natural climate cycles play a part in each year’s hurricane outlook. Every few years, the planet shifts between El Niño and La Niña events, which cause temperatures in the Pacific Ocean to grow periodically warmer and cooler. These events influence weather and climate patterns around the globe, with El Niño typically associated with below-average Atlantic hurricane activity and La Niña contributing to more active seasons.This year, the planet is in a neutral phase, meaning Pacific Ocean temperatures are close to average. With no El Niño event to hinder the formation of tropical cyclones, warmer-than-average Atlantic temperatures are likely to fuel an active season.Climate change is partly to blame. Scientists warn that greenhouse gas emissions and continued global warming are gradually raising sea surface temperatures across much of the world. Studies suggest that hurricanes are intensifying faster and growing stronger as a result, leading to a greater risk of major storms striking the United States.Last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was a stark reminder of the growing dangers.Hurricane Beryl smashed records in July as the earliest Atlantic hurricane to achieve a Category 4, before eventually expanding to a Category 5. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified into the season’s second Category 5 storm — and although it weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall, it dropped historic rainfall and spawned dozens of tornadoes along the Florida coast.And Hurricane Helene made history as an unusually large and fast-moving storm, hitting Florida as a Category 4 and barreling inland, where it carved a path of destruction through Appalachia. It became the deadliest storm to strike the mainland U.S. since Hurricane Katrina.Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals. #hurricane #season #soonnoaa #says #its

May 20, 20253 min readWhy Tornado Season Has Been So DestructiveSeveral devastating tornado outbreaks have cut swaths of destruction across the U.S. What’s driving these damaging storms?By Andrea Thompson edited by Dean VisserA U.S. Air Force aerobatic team flies in formation over community members and crews cleaning up debris on May 18, 2025, in the community of Sunshine Hills outside of London, Ky. A tornado struck the neighborhood just after midnight on May 17, 2025. Michael Swensen/Stringer/Getty ImagesNearly 900 tornadoes have torn through more than 30 states so far this year, killing dozens of people, shredding buildings and landscapes across big chunks of the Eastern U.S., and costing billions. The oddly fickle and precise mix of atmospheric ingredients needed to generate tornadoes just happens to have occurred over and over again since mid-March—and the season isn’t over yet.How do tornadoes form?“In order to get a tornado, you need to have a thunderstorm that’s capable of producing a tornado,” says Jana Houser, a tornado researcher at the Ohio State University. Most often, these are what meteorologists call “supercell” thunderstorms, which feature a circulation pattern called a mesocyclone.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Supercell formation requires a set of conditions that make the atmosphere unstable, and these start with warm, moist air at the surface and cold, dry air above. The instability comes from warmer air’s greater buoyancy, which makes it rise upward. And this mix needs yet another specific ingredient, wind shear, “where winds change speed and direction as you go up with height” in the atmosphere, Houser says. This can create sort of a “tube” of horizontally rotating air. Next, the nascent twister needs an updraft, or upward-moving air, which tightens and speeds up the rotating air, taking it “from spinning like a bike tire” to “spinning like a top.”All of these conditions are necessary—but they’re still not always enough. “Most supercells don’t even actually produce tornadoes in their lifetime,” Houser says.The exact mechanics of tornado formation aren’t yet fully understood, but essentially, air rotation at the ground needs to meet a strong updraft aloft; this pulls the rotation in like a figure skater pulling in their arms, as Houser puts it.Where do tornadoes form?Tornadoes can—and do—happen wherever the right conditions are present, from Argentina to Italy to Bangladesh. But the U.S. is by far the leader in the average annual number of these storms. North America’s geography naturally promotes a crucial collision of air masses: juicy air streams northward from the bathtub warmth of the Gulf of Mexico, while cool, dry winds rush eastward over the Rockies. The air masses meet over the center of the country, which is how the region centered around northeastern Texas and Oklahoma came to be called Tornado Alley. “If you were to design a place that would get repeated severe storms, you would build something like the central U.S.,” says Rich Thompson, chief of forecast operations for the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center.But over the past decade or so, that tornado bull’s-eye has changed a bit. A “new Tornado Alley” has emerged about 400 or 500 miles to the east, in part because moist Gulf air is reaching farther east than in the past.Why do tornadoes mainly form in spring?“Spring tends to be the peak because it’s a transitional season,” Houser says. Coming out of winter, there is still abundant cold air at northern latitudes and aloft, and at the same time, the sun is shining much more, heating up the surface air to promote instability.Fall is also a transitional season, but the air aloft remains generally warmer for some time after summer. Tornado activity doesn’t tend to pick up again until later in the fall, when the atmosphere has cooled down again.The local peaks in tornado occurrence tend to move northward as spring rolls into the summer: the Gulf Coast peaks earlier in the spring, the Southern Plains in May and June, and the Northern Plains and upper Midwest in June and July.The Clear Creek post office lays in rubble after a tornado destroyed it. Several tornadoes hit Greene and Monroe counties in south-central Indiana, leaving a path of destruction.Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images via ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy Stock PhotoWhy has the current tornado season been so active?By mid-May the U.S. has had an estimated 886 tornadoes. “We’re on the upper end of what is typical” at this point, Thompson says. Until this month, the most active periods this year were in mid-March and early April. “Those were the two that really pushed us above what is typical,” he adds.The meanderings of the jet stream—a narrow band of strong winds high in the atmosphere—are part of what determines how active a season becomes. The jet stream “really dictates what kinds of weather we end up getting at the surface,” Houser says. It influences the paths storms take, and it forms the boundaries between warmer and cooler air masses.In the case of this spring, “we just have periodic high-energy systems that are moving through,” Houser says, and they have been very effective at producing severe weather when they occur. “It’s just a matter of getting the ingredients to show up and getting the storms to take advantage of them,” Thompson says. #why #tornado #season #has #been

May 13, 20258 min readHow Trump’s National Weather Service Cuts Could Cost LivesWeather experts warn that staff cuts at the National Weather Service that have been made by the Trump administration are a danger to public safety as tornadoes, hurricanes and heat loom this spring and summerBy Andrea Thompson edited by Dean VisserA house submerged in floodwaters, inPointe-Aux-Chenes, Terrebonne Parish, La. Mark Felix/Bloomberg/Getty ImagesJust more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industryFor the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research—a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.NOAA Hurricane Hunters (L-R) Lt. Cmdr. Chris Wood, Flight Engineer Rusty Dittoe, and Hurricane Aircraft Commander Adam Arbitbol flies towards Tropical Storm Debby on Aug. 3, 2024.Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy Stock PhotoWith the growing number of disasters that cost the country $1 billion or more in damages, weather experts have advocated for increasing the agency’s staff and budget. “NOAA is a $12-billion agency trapped in a $5-and-a-half-billion budget,” said Craig McLean, then acting chief scientist of NOAA, in testimony to Congress three years ago.Even before President Donald Trump took office, the NWS was already about 5 percent below the staffing level the service has considered adequate as it scrambled to catch up to a spate of retirements. After the NWS’s first wave of firings and early retirements under the Trump administration, staffing at the service’s 122 field offices across the country has dropped to a 19 percent vacancy rate. Fifty-two offices are now considered “critically understaffed,” meaning a shortage of more than 20 percent. Some branches are down by more than 40 percent. “We’re small offices,” Becker says. Each weather forecast office has about 25 to 30 people. “When you’re down four people, it starts to hurt,” she adds. “There comes a point where you don’t have enough people to cover everything.”The lack of noticeable degradations in forecast quality so far is “because of the valiant efforts of the people who remain in these now critically understaffed roles in field offices,” Swain said in his recent video. “But the cracks are really now starting to show.”Concerns raised over balloon launches, radar and Hurricane Hunters One of the most noticeable effects of the staffing shortage has been the sharp reductions—and even cancellations—of the weather balloon launches that are supposed to happen twice a day at every forecast office across the country. These launches all happen at the same time to give forecasters a three-dimensional snapshot of the atmosphere. Those data are then fed into weather models and are crucial to making sure the models start with the most accurate possible information. This is particularly true during tornado outbreaks or prior to a hurricane landfall. For the former, forecasters need to understand the atmospheric patterns that influence an outbreak to better pinpoint where tornadoes might spin up. And understanding atmospheric patterns over the country is critical to forecasting where a hurricane will make landfall. The lack of balloon launches “is going to degrade weather forecasts to some extent,” Swain said in his video. “And the effects may not be obvious until there’s a major tornado outbreak or hurricane landfall downwind that doesn’t go so well.”The suspensions and cancellations might be somewhat less worrisome if they were evenly spread out, but they are largely clustered in the center of the country—right upwind from Tornado Alley. The fact that a function as essential as balloon launches is being cut is a clear sign of how much staff are feeling the crunch, Swain said.The map shows where weather balloon launches continued as normal (black), have been curtailed (orange) or have been suspended entirely (red).Chris Vagasky, created with OpenStreetMap data (CC BY 2.0)Another concern regards forecasting equipment, such as the nation’s Doppler radar system, which is the only tool that forecasters can use to spot tornadoes inside storms systems, allowing for better warnings. Staffing cuts and spending freezes mean that if any radars or other equipment go down, offices may not have the staff or money to repair them, Becker and others say.Experts are also concerned about the firings of two of NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters—members of the crew that flies aircraft, crammed with state-of-the-art equipment, into the middle of tropical storms and hurricanes to gather data. Research has shown that including these data clearly makes hurricane forecasts more accurate and reliable. Diminished crews mean some flights could be cancelled, leaving coastal communities more vulnerable to approaching storms.The NWS also issues specific aviation, shipping and space weather forecasts—all under threat from the current and proposed cuts.Some of the NWS offices will become so short-staffed that they may have to operate part-time, the agency’s former directors warned in their open letter. This could include making fewer highly tailored forecasts, as well as performing less outreach on social media and to local officials and emergency managers. Such outreach has been a major goal of the NWS to make sure communities are better prepared before extreme weather hits. The forecasters in the NWS offices are “community experts” who have close working relationships with emergency managers, school districts and other local decision-makers, Becker says. Without those proactive efforts, “you’re basically watching the storm,” Uccellini says.Being down so many people means “you have to cut corners—and cutting corners is dangerous with lives and property at stake,” says Jeff Masters, a writer at Yale Climate Connections and a former Hurricane Hunter at NOAA. Uccellini likens what is happening to stretching a rubber band: “You can stretch and stretch it, and then it breaks,” he says. “And when it breaks, you can’t put it back together again.”Meteorologists, associations speak out against cutsNeither artificial intelligence forecasts nor private weather companies will be able to fill in the gap; both rely on the data NOAA collects. Without robust NOAA data collection, “the Weather Channel, Accuweather ... will be unable to function as they have,” says Rick Spinrad, who served as NOAA administrator from 2021 to 2025.People across the vast weather community, from individual meteorologists to professional societies such as the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association, have all expressed alarm about the cuts to NOAA and the NWS and have urged the Trump administration to reverse course. Industries that depend on weather and climate data, such as the insurance industry, have also spoken out. The Union of Concerned Scientists has also sent congressional leaders an open letter to urge them to reinstate NOAA’s staffing and funding that has been signed by more than 3,300 scientists and other experts.Morale is extremely low in offices across the NWS, according to Swain’s video and to Uccellini and many others who know current employees at the agency. Funding cuts are forcing many employees to bring in their own toilet paper and soap. There is also “an extreme culture of fear” Swain said in his video, with “threatening and demeaning communications” from agency leaders that have called employees “lazy” and “low productivity.”“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life." —Five former NWS directors in a May 2 open letterIn their open letter, the former NWS directors contradicted this characterization, speaking of the dedication of the agency’s employees: “They will often sleep in weather forecast offices to make sure poor weather conditions don’t stop them from being on time for their shifts to do their critical work. They stay at their stations during hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe storms, even when extreme weather affects their own families.”The implemented and proposed cuts indicate that those making them have little understanding of how the service works and have not taken time to look for actual inefficiencies, Spinrad and Masters say. Swain and others have concurred. Instead, Spinrad says, the Trump administration has made “easy” cuts such as firing “probationary” employees (those who were newly hired or recently promoted, making them easier to fire). This approach “is trying to use a chainsaw instead of a scalpel to fix the patient” in terms of addressing bureaucratic inefficiencies, Masters says.In response to a detailed list of questions regarding the cuts, the concerns others have expressed about their ramifications and the Trump administration’s willingness to abide by any budget set by Congress from Scientific American, the NWS’s press office wrote, “The National Weather Service is adjusting some services due to temporary staffing changes at our local forecast offices throughout the country in order to best meet the needs of the public, our partners and stakeholders in each office’s local area. These adjustments are also temporary and we will continue to fulfill our core mission of providing life-saving forecasts, warnings, and decision support services.”“In an era of climate change causing increased extreme weather, we should be spending more on NOAA and the National Weather Service, not less,” Masters says. “This is a very poor way to spend our tax dollars.” المصدر: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-trumps-national-weather-service-cuts-could-cost-lives/ #How #Trumps #National #Weather #Service #Cuts #Could #Cost #Lives