Many National Weather Service offices have seen staff reductions of 20% to 40%, limiting forecasting ability, especially in rural areas.
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Even before the new administration began mass terminations and spending freezes, National Weather Service employees would have had their hands full in early April as they cranked out warnings for flash flooding, tornadoes and severe storms.
When that massive storm system moved into the eastern United States and stalled, it had already been a tumultuous few weeks. Weather service forecast meteorologists had been working overtime to keep short-staffed offices open and provide timely weather warnings and data collection.
Under cost-cutting orders from the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, purchasing cards had been frozen, requiring approvals for all but emergency expenses, which sometimes meant lengthy delays. Staff members were left covering shifts by the abrupt departures of hundreds of colleagues who were either fired or accepted retirement offers, including IT workers who had kept their equipment operating smoothly.
Vacancies are now as high as 20% to 40% in some of the 122 weather forecast offices across the nation, leaving critical staff shortages and already causing a “degradation in services,” said Rick Spinrad, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the weather service.
Meanwhile, remaining employees anxiously await the final results of a third round of retirements and buyouts, expected to include about 250 to 300 people, roughly 5% of the remaining staff. Weather Service employees had until April 17 to give final notice if they intended to accept one of the retirement options.
The timing couldn’t be worse, Spinrad said, as the nation moves into its busiest time of year for severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, tropical storms and hurricanes.
When the extended tornado outbreak and flooding arrived over the mid-Mississippi River and lower Ohio River valleys in early April, weather service offices spread themselves even thinner to provide a steady stream of localized forecasts to first responders, emergency managers and the news media. They pleaded for patience from those partners and delayed crucial tornado damage surveys.
In Paducah, Kentucky, the weather service confirmed a record 22 tornadoes for the region, as well as a new four-day rainfall record of 15.59 inches.
‘Should you have the parade on Saturday?’
During such events, the forecast offices provide essential support products for local communities to make decisions, Spinrad said. “Should you have the parade on Saturday? Can the kids have the baseball tournament on Friday night?”
Kathy O’Nan, mayor of Mayfield, Kentucky, population 9,700, understands that dynamic all too well. She was among many local officials and residents following forecasts from the weather service office in Paducah during the April outbreak.
“Every time there’s a warning or the weather is forecast to change, our fire chief is on with the National Weather Service and he feeds those warnings to us,” she said.
Mayfield, about 140 miles northwest of Nashville, learned how critical those federal forecasting services could be when an EF-4 tornado obliterated their downtown on Dec. 10, 2021.
Although 24 lives were lost countywide that night, O’Nan said if you ask anyone in Mayfield whether the weather service saved lives, the answer would 100% be yes. That night, Mayfield “learned to take them seriously,” she said.
Mayfield is part of a region in the Central and Southeastern U.S. experiencing more severe weather and extreme rainfall, which experts say is being driven in part by climate change.
Staffing challenges in weather forecast offices
The weather service is “experiencing significant staffing challenges across multiple regions,” said Victor Gensini, an associate professor of meteorology and severe weather at Northern Illinois University.
At least 51 weather forecast offices are “critically understaffed,” with vacancy rates greater than 20%, Gensini said, based on a data analysis. Weather service regions in the Central and Western U.S. and Alaska are “particularly strained,” he said. He found vacancies at the Fairbanks, Alaska office over 46% and over 41% in Rapid City, South Dakota.
The weather service office in Sacramento, California, distributed a letter on April 16, stating the office would be making changes as it navigates “critically reduce staffing.” The office said it would continue to provide the same level of support to its core partners, but plans to reduce overnight staffing, stop directly answering its publicly listed phone lines, post less frequently on social media and might be delayed in responding to media requests.
A USA TODAY analysis in late March found dozens of vacancies among the key leadership positions at forecast offices. Gensini also pointed out many vacancies among those positions, including 11 vacancies among 38 meteorologists-in-charge positions in the Central region.
“We are a stronger, better, more safe nation when we have a fully-staffed National Weather Service that is dedicated to the mission of saving lives and protecting property,” Gensini said.
Asked for a comment about the cuts, NOAA provided the same statement it has offered before: “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience. We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission.”
A conservative blueprint
The budget cuts and layoffs didn’t totally surprise weather service employees, who numbered about 4,900 before the cuts started. The annual budget for the weather service in 2023 was about $1.3 billion, roughly $3.90 per every U.S. resident citizen.
For months before the Fall 2024 election, Donald Trump and his allies campaigned on massive spending cuts and streamlining the federal bureaucracy.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for the new conservative administration, suggested the weather service fully commercialize its forecasting operations, leaving private weather companies to provide forecasting.
“Commercialization of weather technologies should be prioritized to ensure that taxpayer dollars are invested in the most cost-efficient technologies for high quality research and weather data,” the document stated.
But the private companies use weather service data to make forecasts to their clients, and at least two large private weather forecasting companies have taken positions opposing the Project 2025 recommendation.
Several experts also voiced concern saying privatizing weather forecasting would favor large urban areas, and leave sparsely populated rural communities without adequate forecasting needed for public safety.
Delayed tornado damage surveys
As the April weather system beat up parts of the Central and Eastern U.S. , weather service offices explained to local officials and media that delays might occur as they juggled emergency alerts and staffing issues.
“We sincerely ask for your patience as we continue to balance the delivery of critical, life-saving information during this multi-day event while also working to mitigate staff fatigue,” noted the weather service office in Memphis in a message to its partners.
Due to the need to have “all hands on deck” 24/7 during the storms, weather service offices in Little Rock and Nashville told partners they would be limited in their ability to conduct damage surveys and flood assessments.
It’s not unheard of for weather forecast offices to have to delay damage surveys during extended severe weather outbreaks when the priority is the immediate forecast warnings, said Roger Edwards, who recently retired as a lead forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center. But as staffing levels fall, he said it becomes even more likely that other priorities, such as damage surveys and weather balloon releases are dropped or delayed.
The tornado surveys are important because they document details in the damage that are used to calculate windspeed estimates assigned to tornadoes, Edwards said.
Weather service offices try to help each other by sharing staff and taking on duties that can be done remotely, but when staffing levels begin to be reduced by 20% to 40%, Edwards said it negatively impacts remaining employees.
Alan Gerard, who recently retired from NOAA’s Severe Storms Forecast Laboratory, where he worked closely with weather service meteorologists, said NOAA and weather service employees are under “serious strain.”
Weather service employees are “incredibly dedicated people fully committed to their protection of life and property mission,” Gerard wrote in a post on his Substack, “Balanced Weather.” But the staff responsible for providing the lifesaving mission “is under growing stress,” he said.
Vacancies expanding, stressing staff
Forecasting efforts already are being affected by the cuts, said current and former weather service employees.
Citing staff shortages, the service had either stopped launching weather balloons or reduced launches to only once a day instead of twice a day in at least 11 locations. On April 17, the service issued a blanket notice that it may temporarily reduce or suspend the launches at selected locations due to staffing limitations and priorities.
The balloons validate the forecasts, which ensures accuracy, and without them the offices already are seeing degradation in forecasts, Spinrad said.
The balloons provide valuable measurements on moisture and upper-level wind that can be valuable for things like hail prediction, he said. “It’s these very localized products that are going to be impacted.”
While vacancies across the service over the past decade have hovered at around 10%, vacancies are now close to 20% across the agency, “with numbers climbing weekly,” Gensini said. As additional retirements and buyouts trickle down, he said, that number is “only going to get worse in the coming months.”
The vacancies could mean delays in timely forecast products with critical information that prompts emergency management actions and evacuations, the experts said. For example, when riverfront communities are confronted by rapidly rising water levels, as communities in Kentucky were during the major flooding in April, they look to the National Weather Service River Forecast Centers to quickly analyze rainfall and predict water levels.
The potential for more than 25% vacancies by later in the summer and the toll that could take on the employees left behind worries Gensini and others.
John Sokich, who recently retired as director of congressional affairs for the weather service, explained the stress the meteorologists are under, especially during severe weather outbreaks.
“You’re talking 12-hour shifts and you constantly have to be on point, he said. “It’s physically and emotionally draining to keep going like that and something will break. Working through high impact weather events for multiple days presents physical limitations, is stressful and mentally draining.”
Certainly, the weather service could become more efficient, he said. “But you need to do it with a scalpel and not a hand grenade.”
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She’s written about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X or dinahvp.77 on Signal.