11-02-2025
How Much Does Your Surf Report Rely on NOAA?
If you don't rely on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to plan for a safe and/or at least propitious day—or lifetime—by the sea involving anything from, say, a casual jaunt to your local break to a far-flung strike mission for the ages and everything in between, then you're running with nothing but luck at your side.
NOAA is nothing short of our lifeline on the water, but per last week's email directives, reportedly obtained by WIRED, from the Commander in Chief's cabinet for NOAA employees to 'PAUSE ALL INTERNATIONAL ENGAGEMENTS,' including correspondence with foreign nationals and participation in international commissions, you might wonder whether the Administration is on shaky ground. And that's to say nothing of infamous 'Sharpiegate' culprit Neil Jacobs' nomination to head the potentially soon-to-be-defunct NOAA.
Meanwhile, NOAA employees were also ordered by Acting Commerce Secretary Jeremy Pelter to give an engineer with no oceanic or scientific background to speak of—21-year-old former Twitter employee Nikhil Rajpal—from Elon Musk's unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to edit the Administration. Whether that's to scrub DEI or climate change language, which seems to be the M.O. of the initiative per the President and what appears so far to be his cabinet's playbook, Project 2025, is almost immaterial: It seems that a 21-year-old has been sent to target and gut weather and climate probably not a whole lot you or I can do about any of this. With many of Project 2025's authors now holding senior administrative positions in the White House, it's hard to imagine that things aren't going about as proposed, in which case plans to privatize the weather are on the horizon.
Speculations around this increasingly real possibility abound, with NPR calling it 'a meteorological arms race.' Hyperbole aside, the federal government has been in the business of weather since 1870, and NOAA was drawn into existence by none other than President Richard Nixon a century later at a time when he was in direct contention with SURFER's founder John Severson, and, writ large, the surfing community itself.
Now, President Nixon couldn't have considered that NOAA might directly benefit surfers at the time of NOAA's inception, but there he was, throwing us all a bone. Of course, NOAA does far more than offer meteorological data and enable surf reports: From fisheries regulation and tsunami warning systems to marine rescues and plastic pollution and oil spill mitigation, the Administration has many arms. 'Everyone relies on NOAA, whether you realize it or not,' Ocean Conservancy VP of External Affairs Jeff Watters told Fast Company, putting forth the question, 'Is a [private] company going to invest in multimillion pieces of infrastructure to monitor and understand weather…?'
As for the here and now, it is merely my duty to ask: What for the sake of our collective yet selfish pursuit, dear reader and vested member of the surf community, are we to preempt? What kind of entity (or person) could replace NOAA, and what would our surf forecasts look like going forward? Could it produce the models and analysis therein with the same attention, diligence, detail, technology, and, dare we ask, science? Could you, or I, a lowly scribe, even manage to afford it? Time may tell.
