As hurricane season begins, NOAA told to slow its transition to better models

It's a lousy time to be a US weather forecaster. Even as the Atlantic Ocean heats up, wind shear falls, and the potential for an active hurricane season looms, vacancies have been mounting at the National Hurricane Center in Miami and at National Weather Service offices around the country. According to a new US Government Accountability Office report, morale has sunk among forecasters, and increasing vacancies have led to an inability to provide timely severe weather information to state and local emergency managers.

Instead of addressing this problem, the proposed budget released by the Trump administration late last month would exacerbate the tempest. Overall, the President's budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sought $1.06 billion for the National Weather Service, down six percent from 2017. But the devil is in the details, and some of these details are indeed devilish.

Perhaps most questionable is a "request" to limit the ability of forecasters to predict hurricanes and other severe weather with computer modeling. "NOAA requests a reduction of $5,000,000 to slow the transition of advanced modeling research into operations for improved warnings and forecasts," the budget blue book states.

Incredibly, this request comes as the US Global Forecast System, the nation's premiere forecast model for everything from hurricane tracks to 10-day weather forecasts, continues to get distanced by the European forecast model, which assimilates real-time data far better than the American model and consistently produces significantly better forecasts.

Overall, NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which researches weather and climate phenomena and seeks to improve computer modeling, would see a 22 percent budget decrease from $514 million to $400 million. “This budget would ensure that NOAA-NWS becomes a second- or third-tier weather forecasting enterprise, frozen in the early 2000s,” David Titley, who served as chief operating officer for NOAA from 2012 to 2013, told Capital Weather Gang.

So far, Republican governors in states most affected by hurricanes seem to have shrugged their shoulders at the proposed budget cuts. For example in Florida, a state hit by 40 percent of all U.S. landfalling hurricanes, Gov. Rick Scott said he hadn't considered the matter in detail. “What I’ve done in the state is to try to solve things," he told the Miami Herald. "So we’ve put a lot of money into beach renourishment and this year I’ve proposed $50 million-plus.”