Forecasting Cuts Leave Some Worried For Hurricane Season
10:15 minutes
This article is part of The State of Science, a series featuring science stories from public radio stations across the United States. This story, by Emily Jones, was originally published by WABE in partnership with Grist.
Many in Georgia are still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene last fall.
Now, firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service and other agencies have some experts worried about accurate forecasts heading into the next hurricane season, which begins June 1.
Hundreds of workers have been fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, including meteorologists at the Weather Service. More cuts by the Trump administration are reportedly on the way.
“The forecast is not going to be as accurate because it won’t have as much information in it,” said Chuck Watson of ENKI research in Savannah, who studies disaster preparedness and response.
He said he’s already seeing the impact of the firings, with the erosion of systems that weather experts rely on. “Now, going forward, it’s going to get progressively worse because, again, systems fail, they’re not funded to replace it, or they don’t have the people to replace it,” he said.
Forecasters, Watson said, depend on information from lots of sources: NASA and Department of Defense satellites, Federal Aviation Administration weather stations at airports, Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Geological Survey flood gauges and international weather stations maintained by USAID. Many of those agencies are facing their own cuts, too, which he said will also have an impact on forecasting.
“It’s like a fabric or a carpet. You start picking at it like my cat does, you start pulling that thread out, before long you’ve got this big rip in the carpet and a big mess,” Watson said.
NOAA declined to discuss personnel matters but said in an emailed statement that it remains dedicated to “providing timely information, research and resources.”
“We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission,” a NOAA spokesperson wrote.
Risk of ‘fuzzier’ forecasts
Watson said even small declines in accuracy can have a big impact.
In the Southeast, where hurricanes are a major concern, forecast accuracy is critical because the precise track of a hurricane can make the difference between an expensive, stressful evacuation and staying put.
Georgia has avoided unneeded evacuations in recent decades, Watson said, because officials have been confident in the forecast, knowing, for instance, that the storm would stay far enough offshore to keep residents safe.
“If the forecasts get fuzzier, you’re going to have more evacuations,” he said. “Now, OK, you’ve got to evacuate because you can’t be sure that storm is not going to hit you.”
The emergency managers who handle those evacuations are also frustrated by the sudden cuts and contradictory announcements, according to Lynn Budd, the president of the National Emergency Management Association.
“We’re planners. We like to plan,” she said. “We like to know what’s going to happen and how do we prepare for it.”
Frozen funds
The concerns for emergency managers go beyond forecast and planning uncertainty.
State emergency management agencies serve as a middlemen, delivering federal funding to cities and counties for disaster preparedness and recovery. Typically, municipalities apply to their states for reimbursement, and the state agencies in turn get reimbursed by FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security.
But currently, those grants are frozen, Budd said.
“It’s really the whole system that is put on hold right now,” Budd said. “And that’s very concerning to us as we have grants that are obligated to us and we hope those will be released or taken off hold sometime soon.”
Watson, meanwhile, is concerned the cuts to forecasting and weather data collection are a step toward privatization.
He said that move has been attempted before, and it failed.
One reason, he said, is some services that are essential to local residents might not be deemed profitable by a business.
“A private company’s not going to put a gauge on the Ogeechee River or on Lazaretto Creek,” Watson said, naming two smaller waterways on Georgia’s coast. For nearby residents, though, such gauges are critical in the event of a flood.
“It’s actually a responsibility of government to do these kinds of things,” Watson added.
Segment Guests
Emily Jones
Emily Jones is a climate reporter for WABE and Grist in Savannah, Georgia.
Segment Transcript
FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman, and now it’s time to check in on the state of science.
SPEAKER 1: This is KERN.
SPEAKER 2: For WWNO.
SPEAKER 3: St. Louis Public Radio.
SPEAKER 4: Iowa Public Radio News.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Local science stories of national significance. Hundreds of federal workers at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been laid off or are in job limbo, thanks to the Trump administration’s cuts to government. But what will these cuts mean for hurricane forecasting in coastal states like Georgia, states that rely on data and resources from this agency to prepare and weather storms?
Here to tell us more is Emily Jones, climate reporter for Grist and WABE in Atlanta, Georgia. Emily is based in Savannah. Emily, welcome to Science Friday.
EMILY JONES: Thank you so much for having me.
FLORA LICHTMAN: OK. Let’s take a step back. I mean, who prepares Georgia for a hurricane? Who’s in charge of that?
EMILY JONES: Well, it’s, as you can imagine, a huge coordinated effort with all kinds of different agencies and groups and school districts and cities. But the sort of point people that bring all those groups together and coordinate that effort are emergency managers. So there’s a state emergency management agency.
Then there are local emergency management agencies dotted all over the state in different counties that really handle that effort at a local level. And so they’re the ones that kind of bring together everything that needs to happen. If an evacuation needs to happen, they’re the ones that are coordinating it. They communicate with the public information about how to prepare for any storm. And then when one is actually coming, how to prepare for this storm, what you need to do, whether roads are closed, whether you need to boil your water, it comes down to and filters through emergency management agencies.
FLORA LICHTMAN: And how do these emergency managers rely on NOAA during hurricane season?
EMILY JONES: NOAA is the agency that puts out the forecasts and all of the information that’s needed to tell people that information I was talking about, how much rain they’re going to get. Do they need to prepare for flooding? Do they need to prepare for winds? Does there need to be an evacuation?
NOAA is the sort of parent agency of the National Weather Service stations that are all over the country, handling sort of little individual regional chunks of the country for forecasting. And then NOAA is also the parent agency of the National Hurricane Center down in Miami, which puts out all of that incredibly detailed information that you see about the track of a storm and the size of a storm and where exactly it is at any given time. Once a storm reaches tropical depression status, the National Hurricane Center starts putting out these regular updates about where the storm is, where it’s going, what they expect, what different places need to do to prepare. So that is really vital for emergency managers.
And beyond just knowing what the forecast is going to be, emergency managers also have relationships with those offices and the people in those offices, so that they can prepare, so that they know who they need to call if they have a question, if they need more information about the forecast. And that’s one of the things that’s really starting to create concern right now with these cuts is it’s not just about hurricane season that hasn’t hit us yet. Emergency managers like to maintain those relationships all the time so that they know who the person is at their National Weather Service station that they can call.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Right, they have them on speed dial.
EMILY JONES: Exactly, exactly. I spoke with Lynn Budd, who is the president of the National Emergency Management Association. And she explained, the phrase she used that really struck me was, you don’t want to be exchanging business cards during the storm.
LYNN BUDD: We’re planners. We like to plan. We like to know what’s going to happen and how do we prepare for it.
FLORA LICHTMAN: That seems reasonable.
EMILY JONES: Yeah.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Are they relying on other agencies for information as well?
EMILY JONES: They are. And this is something in reporting this story that really struck me because it was something that never occurred to me– even as someone who covers forecasting and climate and weather and hurricanes– is that a lot of the information that goes into NOAA and National Weather Service forecasting comes from other places or from technology that’s managed by other agencies. So a lot of satellite imagery, for instance, of weather patterns and just of the earth that goes into forecasting, who manages satellites?
Well, NASA, the Department of Defense, there’s information about flooding of different waterways that comes from flood gauges, which are managed by all kinds of different agencies, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Geological Survey, even the EPA, local, state environmental protection agencies. I mean, all of these different groups manage flood gauges. There are weather gauges at airports.
When you get a forecast, the temperature, it often tells you the temperature at the nearest airport. That’s the FAA, has weather stations at airports because they have to monitor weather for planes taking off. And so all of those inputs go into National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center forecasting.
So, yes, they do rely on other agencies, which, again, I didn’t really realize the extent to which all of that is interconnected until another of my sources for this story, Chuck Watson, who studies disasters and disaster preparedness for an organization called ENKI Research, which is based in Savannah, Georgia, where I am, and he explained how interwoven all of this sort of whole system is.
CHUCK WATSON: It’s like a fabric or a carpet. You start picking at it like my cat does. You start pulling that thread out. Before long, you’ve got this big rip in the carpet and a big mess.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Amazing visual. OK. So are the experts that you talk to, are they concerned about these cuts?
EMILY JONES: They are. And, again, some of the concern is just– not just, I don’t want to downplay it– but some of the concern is about the confusion that exists right now, that sort of limbo that you referred to, that you as Lynn Budd said, emergency managers like to prepare. And they don’t feel like they can be prepared if they don’t even know who the person to call is. The other thing that they’re concerned about, though, is the accuracy of the forecasts because so many of the decisions that go into hurricane preparedness have to do with the forecast of what the storm is going to do.
Where is the storm going to be? And by extension, how far out are the strong winds going to reach? And, therefore, what places have to worry about flooding? What places have to worry about trees falling down?
And the biggest question with a hurricane, do you need to evacuate? And all of that relies on having accurate forecasts so that you can say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that storm is going to stay far enough offshore. We’re going to be OK. We don’t need to evacuate.
Or that storm is going to come close enough that this area is going to flood. It’s not going to be safe. We need to get our people out. And if you’re less certain about the forecast because you don’t have as much data to put into the forecast, there is some potential that you have to order an evacuation that maybe you wouldn’t have needed a few years ago, if you could have said with absolute certainty that the storm was going to stay away.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Did NOAA comment on this story?
EMILY JONES: They did. I reached out to them asking for a comment, as I’m sure lots and lots of reporters have done since these firings were announced. And they did send me a statement that they seem to have at the ready, saying that they declined to discuss personnel matters, but that the agency is still providing timely information, research, and resources, pursuant to their public safety mission was the phrasing that they used.
FLORA LICHTMAN: When does hurricane season start this year?
EMILY JONES: So hurricane season officially starts on June 1st, although we do sometimes see tropical activity outside of hurricane season. Several times in the last few years, we’ve seen a tropical storm or a tropical depression actually spin up sooner than June 1st.
FLORA LICHTMAN: And are people already bracing for it? Is there any preparation that happens now?
EMILY JONES: Yes, I mean, when you live in a place like coastal Georgia or Florida or the Gulf Coast or the Carolinas, you are almost in a constant state of hurricane preparation. And, yeah, there are tips that, again, those emergency management agencies send out headed into hurricane season, reminding people, make your plan. Know what you’re going to do if you need an evacuation.
Stock up on your supplies in case you run out of power. These are all things that pretty much all of us do every hurricane season. I think we probably, in my house, we probably have to restock some of our supplies because we went through them when we lost power during Hurricane Helene.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah. I mean, I’m curious about that, how the public is feeling about this. Have you gotten any sense that the public is sort of conscious of these cuts and concerned? Is this adding a layer of stress for regular people?
EMILY JONES: I am not sure that is there yet in kind of the general consciousness. I mean, when this story published, I did see several people on my social media feeds sharing it and saying, look, this is pointing to a serious concern. And the story mentioned a couple of really local waterways that people were, like, hey, yes, we do need to know if those are going to flood.
I think that general concern about this stuff, it tends to ramp up more as we get into hurricane season, June 1st, and then again September. Late August, September, October is really the busiest part of hurricane season. And so I think we’ll also see more concern accelerate then.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Emily, thank you so much for walking us through your reporting today. Appreciate it.
Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
FLORA LICHTMAN: Emily Jones, climate reporter for Grist and WABE in Atlanta, Georgia. Emily is based in Savannah.
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