Latest news with #NationalWeatherServiceEmployeesOrganization
Politico
4 days ago
- Climate
- Politico
A month after getting permission, NWS still hasn't posted help wanted ads
Vacant posts at NWS local offices after the Trump administration's recent downsizing are now in the spotlight with the catastrophic July 4 floods in Texas that killed more than 100 people when the Guadalupe River rapidly rose in the early morning hours. While federal officials and independent experts said the NWS accurately forecast the flood and issued increasingly urgent warnings about the dangers, they've noted depleted staff across the country could be less able to coordinate with local officials ahead of weather emergencies. 'Considering that there are critical staff shortages at NWS weather forecast offices across the country and the president of the United States has given NWS leadership permission to hire 126 replacements, it begs the question why the Department of Commerce has not implemented a presidential directive,' said Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents many NWS staffers. Two NWS forecast offices that serve the Texas Hill Country region that flooded, Austin/San Antonio and San Angelo, remain without critical staff, including a warning coordination meteorologist in San Antonio who is responsible for coordinating with state and local emergency management agencies during extreme events. But Fahy has noted that the Texas offices were adequately staffed during the flooding because NWS called 'all hands on deck.' As search-and-rescue efforts continued in Texas, the third tropical storm of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season that started June 1 made landfall on the South Carolina coast, causing extensive flooding and prompting water rescues in parts of North Carolina that received up to 10 inches of rain Sunday into Monday. North Carolina officials confirmed Tropical Storm Chantal, which was downgraded to a depression after landfall, had killed two people, knocked out power to more than 30,000 people and closed two major interstate highways. It remains unclear how many key NWS forecast office positions remain vacant across the country. A NOAA list of senior staff by region shows vacancies across the agency's 122 offices, including more than 20 vacancies in local offices under the joint category of warning coordination meteorologist and service coordination hydrologist. There are also 27 empty spots in the combined category 'meteorologist in charge' and 'hydrologist in charge' on the list, which was updated Monday. To date, nearly 600 employees have left NWS in recent months. Many took early retirement or buyout offers, while others were fired as probationary employees. The Commerce Department has since exempted NWS from a sweeping Trump administration hiring freeze for federal agencies, which would allow officials to fill some of those positions.
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Climate
- Boston Globe
As floods hit, key roles were vacant at weather service offices in Texas
Advertisement The shortages are among the factors likely to be scrutinized as the death toll climbs from the floods. Separate questions have emerged about the preparedness of local communities, including Kerr County's apparent lack of a local flood warning system. The county, about 50 miles northwest of San Antonio, is where many of the deaths occurred. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In an interview, Rob Kelly, the Kerr County judge and its most senior elected official, said the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive, and local residents are resistant to new spending. 'Taxpayers won't pay for it,' Kelly said. Asked if people might reconsider in light of the catastrophe, he said, 'I don't know.' The weather service's San Angelo office, which is responsible for some of the areas hit hardest by Friday's flooding, was missing a senior hydrologist, staff forecaster, and meteorologist in charge, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, the union that represents weather service workers. Advertisement The weather service's nearby San Antonio office, which covers other areas hit by the floods, also had significant vacancies, including a warning coordination meteorologist and science officer, Fahy said. Staff members in those positions are meant to work with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn local residents and help them evacuate. That office's warning coordination meteorologist left April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration used to reduce the number of federal employees, according to a person with knowledge of his departure. Some of the openings may predate the current Trump administration. But at both offices, the vacancy rate is roughly double what it was when Trump returned to the White House in January, according to Fahy. John Sokich, who until January was director of congressional affairs for the weather service, said those unfilled positions made it harder to coordinate with local officials because each weather service office works as a team. 'Reduced staffing puts that in jeopardy,' he said. A spokesperson for the weather service, Erica Grow Cei, did not answer questions from The New York Times about the Texas vacancies, including how long those positions had been open and whether those vacancies had contributed to the damage caused by the flooding. 'The National Weather Service is heartbroken by the tragic loss of life,' she said in a statement, adding that the agency 'remains committed to our mission to serve the American public through our forecasts and decision support services.' Advertisement A White House spokesperson directed a request for comment to the Commerce Department, which includes the weather service. A Commerce spokesperson said there have been no funding cuts to the weather service and added: 'The timely and accurate forecasts and alerts for Texas this weekend prove that the NWS remains fully capable of carrying out its critical mission.' The tragedy began to unfold in the early hours of Friday, when more than 10 inches of rain fell in some areas northwest of San Antonio, including in Kerr County, where more than 850 people were evacuated by rescuers. Several campers and a counselor from Camp Mystic, a girls' summer camp in Kerr County, remained missing Sunday, according to Larry Leitha, the county sheriff. On Saturday night, Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, appeared to fault the weather service, noting that forecasters Wednesday had predicted as much as 6 to 8 inches of rain in the region. 'The amount of rain that fell in this specific location was never in any of those forecasts,' he said at a news conference with Governor Greg Abbott. But what makes flash floods so hazardous is their ability to strike quickly, with limited warning. Around midnight Thursday, the San Angelo and San Antonio weather offices put out their first flash flood warnings, urging people to 'move immediately to higher ground.' The office sent out additional flash flood warnings through the night, expanding the area of danger. It is not clear what steps local officials took to act on those warnings. A spokesperson for the Kerr County emergency management department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Advertisement The amount of rain that fell Friday morning was hard for the weather service to anticipate, with reports in some areas of 15 inches over just a few hours, according to Louis W. Uccellini, who was director of the weather service from 2013 until 2022. 'It's pretty hard to forecast for these kinds of rainfall rates,' Uccellini said. He said that climate change was making extreme rainfall events more frequent and severe, and that more research was needed so that the weather service could better forecast those events. An equally important question, he added, was how the weather service was coordinating with local emergency managers to act on those warnings as they came in. 'You have to have a response mechanism that involves local officials,' Uccellini said. 'It involves a relationship with the emergency management community, at every level.' But that requires having staff members in those positions, he said. Under the Trump administration, the weather service, like other federal agencies, has been pushed to reduce its number of employees. By this spring, through layoffs and retirements, the weather service had lost nearly 600 people from a workforce that until recently was as large as 4,000. This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Climate
- Yahoo
2025 hurricane season could see degraded forecasts because of weather service cuts
South Florida plunges deeper into the 2025 hurricane season with its National Weather Service office in Miami down five meteorologists, a deficit that gives it the highest vacancy rate among Florida's five weather forecasting offices. According to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, Key West has four meteorologist positions that are unfilled. Tallahassee is down three. Melbourne and Tampa have two empty seats each. The shortages have some experts worried that public services and forecasts may suffer this hurricane season, which is expected to again have above-normal activity. 'They won't have as much time to monitor what is going on at the local level, especially with short-fused warnings,' said James Franklin, former branch chief of the Hurricane Specialist Unit at the National Hurricane Center about the local forecast offices. 'When they are short-staffed, two people have to do the job of three.' While the National Hurricane Center forecasts the big picture for tropical cyclones — path, strength and size — the weather forecasting offices focus on the details for local communities. And those details are critical, such as when Hurricane Milton shredded the state with 45 tornadoes in October, leaving six people dead in the Spanish Lakes Country Club Village mobile-home community in Fort Pierce. The Miami NWS office forecasts for seven counties, including Palm Beach County. The meteorologists in weather forecasting offices are also responsible for working directly with county officials, translating the forecasts into the impacts and hazards that could be felt by individual communities. Sometimes they embed in emergency operations centers to better help local officials decide when and who to evacuate as a storm approaches. 2025 hurricane season : New forecast calls for above normal season but questions remain 'It's not so much that the National Hurricane Center won't be able to get a forecast out, they will, but the local services will be degraded,' Franklin said. It's unclear yet how many of the vacancies at the nation's 122 local forecast offices are a direct result of the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency budget cuts. Tom Fahy, legislative director of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, said his office is working now to parse out that information from the 600 positions that were lost across the country this year. About half of those were voluntary early retirements, while 108 were fired probationary employees. The remainder were voluntary deferred resignations, Fahy said. The NWS has since announced it wants to hire 126 people, and it's asking for current employees to transfer to offices in need of critical positions including meteorologists, science and operations officers and warning-coordination meteorologists. Miami and Key West are on that list as offices in need. 'The National Weather Service is doing their very level best to fill the critical vacancies ASAP, but when that will happen is to be determined,' Fahy said. 'We have hurricane season, but in California wildfire season has started, so we have two different weather disasters.' Ken Graham, director of the NWS, said in May that local offices will get additional resources where needed during emergencies. 'Every warning is going to go out,' Graham said. Although Graham, and the U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, have said that the National Hurricane Center is fully staffed, Fahy said there are five openings at the Miami-based hurricane center. Those include a hurricane specialist, who forecasts the track, intensity and size of storms, a marine forecaster, and positions that maintain and update operational software. More: Hurricane hunters save lives, but NOAA plane breakdowns, staffing shortages put them at risk Franklin said it's typical for there to be a small number of vacancies at any given time at the NHC, and that while it is not fully staffed, 'they are reasonably well staffed.' 'I don't think that is true with the weather forecast offices,' Franklin said. Fahy said Miami's NWS office has a 38% vacancy rate among its meteorologists. Key West was second highest at 30%. There are six offices nationwide — none in Florida — that have shuttered their typical 24-hour operations between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., Fahy said. Others have reduced their twice-daily weather balloon launches, which are important for measuring temperature, humidity and pressure in the atmosphere, as well as tracking wind speed and direction. The Washington Post previously reported that since March 20, 17% of balloon launches nationwide that should have occurred didn't because of staffing losses. A weather balloon that fails to launch in the Great Plains may not seem like it could hinder hurricane forecasts, but the lack of information on upper air movements — steering winds — can leave blind spots. 'I think it's safe to say that because of the reduction in weather balloon launches, that some forecasts this summer for hurricanes will be degraded,' Franklin said. 'The problem is it will be difficult to predict when those degradations might occur, how large they might be, and even after the fact, we might not now whether a particular forecast is bad because some launches didn't happen.' Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes for Yale Climate Connections, said he believes the loss of balloon data could mean the hurricane forecast cone will be too small this season, 'giving people overconfidence in the accuracy of the hurricane forecasts.' 'Such overconfidence can result in delayed evacuation decisions and failure to take adequate measures to protect lives and property,' Masters said. Kimberly Miller is a journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network of Florida. She covers real estate, weather, and the environment. Subscribe to The Dirt for a weekly real estate roundup. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@ Help support our local journalism, subscribe today. This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Hurricane Season 2025 forecasts could be hurt by Trump budget cuts
Washington Post
16-05-2025
- Climate
- Washington Post
Where local forecast offices no longer monitor weather around the clock
For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country. In four of the agency's 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren't enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.
