What the National Weather Service cuts may mean for forecasting on the verge of severe-storm season

Say those who have been there, all available evidence suggests that whoever was behind the wave of cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service has never worked in a forecast office during a severe-thunderstorm or tornado outbreak.

While some clams have been more forthcoming about the potential impacts than agency officials, former weather service employees and others in the meteorological community say the DOGE-inspired cuts of President Donald Trump’s administration have exacerbated staffing shortages and could constitute a clear and present danger to public safety.

Gary Szatkowski, who was in charge of the weather service’s Mount Holly office from 1997 to 2006, said he sees symptoms of an agency in “serious crisis.” And more cuts are expected.

The staff reductions ordered by the Commerce Department have hit every division in NOAA, and atmospheric scientists and advocates warn that ultimately they could have deleterious effects on climate research.

But impacts on short-term forecasting would be more immediate given that the severe-storm season is just getting underway. The personnel shortages already appear to be affecting the collection of data used by commercial companies and to inform computer models.

Understaffing is a recipe for forecaster fatigue, Szatkowski said. “Just as you would not want to be on a flight where both pilots were seriously tired … you do not want an exhausted meteorologist making critical warning decisions.”

About 12,000 people work for NOAA, and roughly 4,000 of those at the weather service.

Estimates vary, but gone are over 1,000 NOAA employees, who were either fired probationary employees or veterans who opted for an instant retirement program that came with eight months’ pay, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

Of those, 280 worked for the weather service, the union said, or about 7% of the workforce.

According to a memo obtained by The Inquirer, 1,029 more NOAA workers are losing their jobs; the weather service, however, is being spared in this latest round.

One symptom of the hastily executed cuts: According to a Commerce Department memo obtained by The Inquirer, an undetermined number of those fired were reinstated because their dismissal letters had been “sent in error.” They are being paid for the two weeks they were gone.

The deletions come atop 600 preexisting vacancies, four of those in the Mount Holly office — two meteorology posts and two technician positions.

Another source said that Mount Holly so far has been spared the ax in this round. Jason Franklin, the meteorologist in charge, deferred all questions to weather service headquarters, where spokesperson Susan Buchanan said the agency did not discuss “internal personnel” matters.

A former NOAA official said the reductions hurt all the more given that the cuts included staffers — among them some experienced NOAA scientists — hired to fill long-standing vacancies.

Meteorologist Tony Gigi, who for 20 years did the scheduling in the Mount Holly office and is now retired, said the Mount Holly office has been short-staffed since 2014.

Quantifying the impacts of reduced staffing would be all but impossible, but Gigi said that when people are tired, “Errors creep up, mistakes get made.”

“This is a thinking job,” he said, and fatigue “compounds itself.”

It’s likely to get busier sooner than later in weather offices around the country. In spring, thunderstorms become more numerous.

Forecasting severe storms “is one of the most demanding jobs” in the weather service and the most “unforgiving,” Szatkowski said. It requires intense training that becomes more difficult to schedule when the office is short-staffed.

During a storm outbreak, “we would not let anyone sit in the decision-making chair for too long,” he said. When forecasters got too tired, they were rotated out to something less stressful, such as collecting weather spotter reports.

Staff reductions lead to other stresses, Szatkowski said. It means more people cannot get requested time off, meaning they might miss family events. “Some members of management can and do step in to fill operational forecast shifts,” he said. “But that can only go so far.”

Gigi said the cuts are adding more stress. He said they also present a catch-22 dilemma to forecasters. They’re ripped if something goes wrong. But “if you don’t slip up,” the perception is “you didn’t need the people who were there.”

The cuts are having a direct effect on the weather service’s upper-air observations. Twice a day, balloons are launched at 92 sites around the country. The instrument packs collect invaluable information on winds, temperature, and moisture that inform computer models and short-term forecasts. The data are invaluable during severe-storm threats, and determining whether precipitation will fall as rain, snow, or sleet during a winter storm.

But because of personnel shortages, balloons are being launched only intermittently in Albany, N.Y., and Gray, Maine, and are suspended indefinitely in Alaska, the weather service said.

Szatkowski said those data are so important that ordinarily some way would have been found to continue the launchings on schedule, perhaps by asking other offices to help.

“That tells me,” Szatkowski said, that the weather service is “in serious crisis.”

Whatever considerations drove the cut decisions, careful analysis was not one of them, said Jon Nese, a former Franklin Institute and Weather Channel meteorologist and now a professor at Pennsylvania State University.

“It’s always a good exercise to take a look at your organization and ask if it can be more efficient,” he said. “This is not cutting fat, this is like cutting ligaments and tendons.”

The cuts, he said, were “just so haphazard” and executed far too quickly.

More shoes are likely to drop. A source said cuts in the pipeline could leave the workforce 12% lighter than it was last month.

The weather service said it will keep on keeping on. Buchanan said in the statement: “We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings.”

Szatkowski, referring to the tired-pilots analogy, said an airline can always reschedule a flight.

“You cannot tell the severe weather to reschedule and come back tomorrow,” he said.