As Shitstain Slashes NOAA And NWS Budget & Staff, Colorado State Predicts 9 Named Hurricanes, Four Of Them Major Storms
With towns and cities in the southeastern United States still reeling from hurricanes that hit last year, scientists are now releasing their forecasts for what could unfold in the hurricane season that starts in less than two months. Colorado State University is predicting nine hurricanes in 2025, four of which could spin up into major strength, while AccuWeather is forecasting up to 10. Both are predicting an above-average season similar to last year’s, which produced monster storms like Helene. That hurricane inundated swaths of the U.S., killing 249 people and causing $79 billion in damage across seven states.
The Trump administration’s slashing of jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then, is coming at a dangerous time, experts say, as the agency generates a stream of data essential to creating hurricane forecasting models. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has eliminated hundreds of positions at NOAA as part of Musk’s stated aim of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget. Last week, news broke that the administration was proposing to cut NOAA’s overall budget by 25 percent, with plans to eliminate funding for the agency’s research arm.
NOAA and its various divisions, like the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center, are the ones collecting and processing the data that weather apps like AccuWeather use for their daily forecasts. Hurricane forecasters also rely on data coming from a range of government-owned instruments: real-time measurements of ocean temperatures from a network of buoys and satellites and wind speeds from weather balloons. Those readings help scientists predict what the conditions leading up to hurricane season might say about the number of storms that could arrive this summer and their potential intensity.
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While the Trump administration is slashing NOAA’s budget and staff ostensibly to save money, the agency actually saves Americans six dollars for every dollar invested in the agency, according to Justin Mankin, director of the Climate Modeling and Impacts Group at Dartmouth College. An accurate forecast can, for instance, help communities better prepare for extreme weather and mitigate any damage. Cutting jobs at NOAA, Mankin suspects, might be a step toward turning it into a for-profit entity, instead of one providing free data to hurricane researchers and the public at large. “The institutions that are being taken apart by DOGE have some of the highest credibility and return on investment of any in the government,” Mankin said. “The perverse thing that seems to be happening here is that this is about a systematic degradation of the quality of the science coming out of these institutions and about instilling a loss of confidence.”
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https://grist.org/climate/hurricane-season-forecast-doge-slashes-noaa-jobs/
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