Last week’s blizzard, the deadly Pilger tornadoes and Hurricane Sandy share something in common: People got a better heads-up due to a forecasting tool now being grounded as the Trump administration slashes the federal government.
On Thursday, National Weather Service offices in Omaha and Rapid City, South Dakota, stopped deploying weather balloons, a key tool in forecasting. On the same day, six other weather stations in the central U.S, including at North Platte, halved their use of balloons.
The bottom line, say meteorologists contacted by the Flatwater Free Press: Next time bad weather hits, don’t count on forecasts to be as good as they have been.
“They are very critical in severe weather, and this puts a hole right in the middle of the Great Plains and Tornado Alley,” said Brian Smith, a retired National Weather Service meteorologist from Omaha who coordinated tornado and storm warnings for eastern Nebraska and southwest Iowa.
The timing – at the outset of severe weather season – couldn’t be worse, he said.
“It’s not a good thing,” Smith said.
The weather service attributed the move to a lack of staffing. The decision comes as the Trump administration appears poised to cut another 1,000 jobs nationwide at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that houses the weather service.
Weather balloons are an old-school technology married to high-tech equipment. They loft sophisticated sensors many miles into the atmosphere and across great distances, allowing forecasters to “see” in detail what is happening in the atmosphere by measuring things such as temperature, humidity and wind speed.
Prior to the cutbacks, balloons were supposed to be released twice daily at 100 sites in the U.S., Caribbean and Pacific Basin. Due to the cutbacks and other issues such as helium shortages, at least 14% are no longer operating on a full schedule, the Associated Press reported. The balloons are among approximately 1,300 operated worldwide by various countries.
Smith and other meteorologists said they take no comfort from the weather service depicting the balloon curtailment as “temporary” or stating that the agency would launch balloons “for special operations as needed.”
President Donald Trump ordered a hiring freeze across most of the federal government when he came into office. The freeze remains in place at the weather service, according to the National Weather Association, a professional organization for meteorologists.
After the freeze, the cuts started. NOAA lost hundreds of employees – possibly more than 1,000 – in February as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cut jobs across the federal government, multiple media outlets reported. Those combined with the additional 1,000 expected cuts could amount to as many as one in four jobs at NOAA being eliminated, according to the Associated Press.
Confusion clouds staffing levels at the weather service and elsewhere due to court orders blocking some cuts, the federal government reversing itself on others and threats of possibly more cuts to come.
Even before the hiring freeze and cuts, the weather service struggled for years to fill vacant positions. The Omaha office is currently down about 26%, with some of those vacancies preceding Trump’s return to the White House, according to the agency’s website and internet archives.
Consistent, daily weather balloon data from the central U.S. has value regionally, globally and over the long term, said John Pollack, another retired weather service meteorologist in Omaha. But it is especially needed during severe weather.
Private forecasting services, including apps on smartphones and television broadcasts, depend on the technology, data and forecasting done by the National Weather Service, Pollack said. So losses within the federal forecasting agency are felt throughout the weather industry.
The weather service does have other sources of data: satellites, buoys, radar stations and monitors carried by airplanes. Those sources can’t match the precision of data that balloon sensors produce, Pollack said.
Data from balloon launches also improves forecasts for areas “downwind” of the balloon’s path.
The more heavily populated upper Midwest and Northeast will have less information to feed into their forecasts due to reduced balloon data from the central U.S., said James McCormick, a Bellevue-area meteorologist who has worked in private industry.
Likewise, eastern Nebraska’s forecasts will be diminished due to less balloon data from stations at North Platte and in Wyoming and Colorado, he said.
Most troubling in the near-term, according to the meteorologists who spoke with FFP, is what the cuts say about weather service staffing.
“If they can’t do this any more, they are severely understaffed,” Pollack said.
A short-staffed weather service office is more prone to errors that can have serious consequences, they said. That’s because forecasters put in long, chaotic hours during severe weather, sometimes with little break between successive rounds.
James Davidsaver, director of emergency management for Lincoln/Lancaster County, said he worries about understaffing at the weather service and how that could affect his ability to get good information to the public.
“(Last week) we saw record high temperatures one day and a blizzard the next,” he noted. “That just indicates how extreme the weather can be.”
The weather service also announced a reduction in balloon launches at locations in South Dakota, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan and Wyoming.
Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the weather service, acknowledged the importance of good data.
“The more data we can feed into our weather models, the more accurate our forecasts, but I can’t speculate on the extent of future impacts,” she said.
To show the importance of weather balloons and how weather systems are interconnected, meteorologists cite storms like Hurricane Sandy. In 2012, the weather service ordered hundreds of extra balloon releases across the country as the hurricane moved up the East Coast. The reason? They feared the storm would make a freak left turn into New York City. Atmospheric data helped validate the extraordinary preparations that were necessary.
Likewise, in June 2014, troublesome signs in the atmosphere above eastern Nebraska prompted the weather service in Omaha to send up an extra, specially timed balloon. Data from that launch confirmed forecasters’ fears that conditions in northeast Nebraska were ripe for significant tornadoes, McCormick said. Within hours twin tornadoes would sweep through Pilger as part of a larger, deadly outbreak.
And with winter storms like last week’s blizzard, data from balloon releases help the weather service better target where the worst of the snow will hit, Pollack said.
Over the long-term, a decrease in data from weather balloons will slow improvements in forecasting because the real-world data the sensors provide allow scientists to update and fix forecasting models. Meteorologists share weather data worldwide, so lost data in the U.S. has a global impact.
“This will definitely degrade forecasts,” Pollack said. “(With models), it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out.”
2 Comments
Yeah, yeah ,yeah. We got it.
Everything’s “alarming”, “troubling”, “dangerous”, “oligarchy”, a “constitutional crisis”. Cat and dogs, living together. It’s crazy out there!
Of course, when everything’s a constitutional crisis, then nothing is.
We got it Flatwater–the sky is falling.
Does anyone remember the fairy tale about the falling sky?
There are plenty of meteorologists working in and for the private sector who are doing what the NWS is doing, often much better.
Like PBS/NPR, it’s time to defund the NWS to $0.