Hurricane forecasts may be less accurate this year.
That’s the warning Democratic Congressional leaders and former NOAA officials raised during a virtual press conference Wednesday.
They argued it’s due to staffing and budget cuts at NOAA.
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The staffing reductions reduced the agency’s ability to launch weather balloons as often and left Florida facilities understaffed by 20 to 40 percent, according to the panel of experts.
Former Branch Chief of the National Hurricane Center’s Hurricane Specialist Unit James Franklin argued the cuts will immediately make it more difficult to predict hurricane tracks and intensities.
“And it’s going to be really hard to know in advance. So, what that means is it just lessens the confidence that we have that any particular forecast this season is gonna be accurate because we don’t know when those holes are going to turn out to be significant,” said Franklin.
Former Director of the Hurricane Research Division at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Dr. Frank Marks, said the number of researchers qualified to fly on hurricane-hunting planes has been cut in half.
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The Trump Administration has also frozen $400 million included in the December disaster relief bill intended to upgrade and purchase new hurricane hunter aircraft.
“And so, that’s going to be a major obstacle for us staffing aircraft, and that’ll mean likely less airborne Doppler radar data, less dropsondes support for the National Hurricane Center observations this year,” said Marks.
On top of the immediate concerns, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL 25th District) claimed President Trump’s budget proposal would shutter all twelve NOAA research labs across the country as part of a $2.2 billion budget reduction.
The proposal has not yet received Congressional approval.
“If we have a degradation in our ability to forecast intensity and we have a degradation in our ability to impact and shorten the timing in which we notify people, then people are gonna die,” said Wasserman Schultz.
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The proposed cuts, the group argued, would inhibit any future improvements to forecasting accuracy.
Dr. Marks pointed to the devastating floods in Texas as evidence that there is always room for improvement.
“Without the research, what we see today will likely become the norm,” said Marks.
Action News Jax reached out to NOAA asking whether any current or potential future cuts have impacted its ability to respond to storms.
We were told the agency doesn’t comment on personnel matters and doesn’t speculate on things that may or may not happen in the future.
“NOAA remains dedicated to providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.
“We continue to deliver weather information, forecasts, and warnings, and conduct research pursuant to our public safety mission,” a NOAA spokesperson told us in an emailed statement.
The First Alert Weather Team feels like they can still accurately forecast our weather. The concern is the potential for a degradation of data in the longer term if budget cuts continue.
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