A lot of you read my post yesterday about NOAA firing about 800 people. I posted it as a follow-up to my initial post about reports I could verify that local offices would be impacted by these eventual firings as many folks protested my assertion and waved their proverbial finger in my face saying it would not happen.
It happened.
The post yesterday saw similar responses about people simply being re-hired or it not being a very big deal. I wanted to respond to a handful of comment that I feel we left in good faith or have a fundamental misunderstanding of the multi-layered and interconnected nature of NOAA and the NWS.
When I make posts about things that are happening within a political realm, I will only offer you facts. And if I do state my opinion, I will always preface it with some sort of, “this is my opinion”
When I said, “These folks are a foundational part of the weather enterprise.” that wasn’t an opinion, that was a fact.
When I said, “For years, this country has invested in improving forecast accuracy, modeling, and warning systems. Yesterday, we took a giant step backward.” that wasn’t nn opinion, that was sa fact.
When I said, “we are less safe today than yesterday” that wasn’t an opinion. That is a fact.
And I want to reiterate here: You, me, and everyone in the comments are all on the same team. I think sometimes people forget this. We are all Humans. And aside from the bots and international spammers, we are all Americans. And weather impacts all of us equally. A tornado is going to hit my house the same as it will hit your house. It doesn’t care if one person voted for this, or another person protested that.
We are all Americans. We are all regular people. And the only reason politicians and folks with a ton of money try to divide us, and pit us against each other, is to preoccupy our attention from whom we should really, collectively, be arguing with.
When I respond to questions and comments like these, I do so taking time out of my day and my free time to hopefully help educate and inform you about the realities of the situation to the best of my knowledge and available data I can collect. It isn’t because you have an opinion and I disagree. It is because you asked a question and I am choosing to give you an answer.
Joe Martin: Do this for us all… tell us what probationary employees hired in the last year or less do this job. Second tell us how it all worked in the year before these employees were hired.
I cannot list all 800 jobs. But I can give you a few examples.
Andy Hazleton was terminated as apart of these cuts. He was one of the lead hurricane modelers in NOAA. He wasn’t laid off for poor performance, we know that. He was personally responsible for the development and maintenance of the HAFS model which is one of the hurricane models that performs very well with track and intensity in the short-term window.
Staffing was cut so much in Alaska that, until further notice, the National Weather Service is indefinitely suspending weather balloon launches at Kotzebue, Alaska. And the knee-jerk response might be, “no one lives there, why launch a weather balloon?” But that is actually one of the key locations to sample the inside of potential severe weather producers in the Plains and Southeast. These weather balloon launches act like unmanned hurricane hunter missions where we get to see inside of storms before they get here. We learn more about how to predict where it may go and what it may do.
Multiple 88D radar technicians were also fired. These are the people that make sure the radar stays up and running at all times as the radar runs 27/7/365. I’m working to confirm this, but I’ve read in a few places that in Alabama there is a chance that there are no radar techs left at one of the offices, meaning when the radar has a problem, there is no one to resolve it. You may ask, how often do radars fail?” Well, the “88” in 88D stands for 1988, when these radars were originally installed. That means these are nearly 40 years old. These things hiccup, break and need service frequently.
The “year before they were hired” isn’t an easy discernable metric because we do not know of the 800 probationary employees who were new hires versus who were promoted.
Deana Mills Burns: I’m sure there are some who are needed and will get hired back. However, I’m sure that many were not needed.
From what I’ve been told by a few different folks inside NOAA is that they will not be. And cannot be. The Office of Personnel Management crafted the lay-off wording as “Terminations” not as a large scale reduction in force. If you are “terminated” from the NWS you cannot ever be re-hired for any government position.
And given the arbitrary nature of the firings, there is zero evidence that these people were not needed.
Levi Davis: Where was this outrage for the people who lost their jobs from Biden shutting down pipelines? If that many people were cut, that many people were not needed.
We can have a separate discussion about the impact of job loss on each individual person at another time. It is sad whenever there are layoffs and this post wasn’t about how layoffs shoudl not happen.
This post was specifically about cutting jobs that are directly tied to public safety and economic prosperity. Perhaps I didn’t communicate that well enough. I am more concerned about laying off 800 people that are responsible for preparing the US for natural disasters and warning all of us that they are coming – be it tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, or anything else Mother Nature can throw at us.
The ROI for the NWS has been reported between 20-to-1 and 30-to-1. So for every tax dollar spent on the NWS, the US public makes about 20 to 30 bucks.
As far as the specific number of people fired, I can’t speak to whether or not there are 800-too-many people working across NOAA or not. What I can speak to is that firing 800 people arbitrarily just because they are probationary is no the most prudent move as it costs us a lot of great minds and hard workers.
Lorin Sanford Holmes: How can one agency have “800 new hires”?
The probationary period for NOAA – depending on the division – can be up to three years from what I’ve learned. And “probationary” includes new hires and people recently promoted. So you are considered a “new hire” for 36 months in some cases – even if you have worked for NOAA for 30 years and got promoted 2 years and 11 months ago. That is how there are 800 of these types of employees across an agency with more than 10,000 workers.
Doug Smith: The REAL question is: “How many meteorologists are necessary in order to achieve the job at hand?”
A great question. I think our three local offices employ somewhere between 10 and 15 meteorologists. Another about 2 to 4 technicians each, a single person that is a support/admin. How many do we need? We can do the math and try to build a “bare bones” operation that simply watches the radar, produces a single forecast, and maintains equipment.
The NWS works 24/7/365 and you need at least 2 meteorologists on staff at all times – in case one has to step away from the desk to each some food or use the bathroom. There are 168 hours in a week, multiplied by two people, so you have to “cover” 336 hours per week. Divide that by 40-hour work week and you get 8.4 people. But since you can’t hire half of a person, lets call it 9 (You may ask, “Just hire someone part time!” but you can’t find quality candidates for part-time work in meteorology. Trust me. I’ve been looking for about 10 years for one. I’ve found a single person. And I refuse to let him quit). We also need a technician available at all times in case something breaks. So that’s another three.
So now we have every hour of every day covered and we have 12 people on staff. But what happens when someone wants to take a vacation or is out sick? We need to hire more staff to balance out the schedule for that, too. So, for meteorologists, we did half of that already with rounding up from 8.4 to 9. We can’t add just a single person, because if multiple people are sick at once we need coverage, so lets hire two. We now have a total of 11. And we should probably have another technician, too. That brings us to 4.
So far this is for a weather service office that only has sunshine and no bad weather ever. Like San Diego. But when bad weather strikes, you need multiple people in house at once. How many? Often times for our local offices there are two radar operators, one person on the forecast, two people on mesoanalysis, one person communicating with the public, public officals, and emergency management, one person collecting storm reports, and one person managing operations and picking up operational things that others cannot in the moment. That is 8 meteorologists. All working at the same time. The next day, you also have at least two meteorologists that have to survey the damage. Now the schedule is all discombobulated. And we need to make sure that meteorologists aren’t working more than 40 hours per week (the government limits overtime as a cost-saving measure) and in order to do that we need to rearrange our other meteorologists, but we end up four meteorologists short. So we need to hire four more. Now we are up to 15.
Oh! And I didn’t mention anything about hydrology and rivers, soils and forestry forecasting for controlled burns, public outreach for education, local research on past events to improve future forecasts, or managing relationships with local public officials and local businesses to ensure forecasts are meaningful to everyone. We could probably assign that all to a two more meteorologists. So we are now at 17.
At a minimum. Just to survive and inform the public ahead of disaster, during storms and after they pass.
Shy Cat: Nick – if you’re so inclined: a number of responses say that the Navy/other military have meteorologists and other weather-related personnel in the thousands. Is that your understanding? If so – do their roles overlap with those at NOAA, and/or is the implication that they can take up any slack at NOAA true? (And if the latter were even possible – that’s not a ship that could turn on a dime, is it?) As always, thanks for all you do.
There are a lot of military meteorologists. I can’t cite a specific number because I don’t know, but I do know it is at least “hundreds” across the Navy, Army, and Air Force. But, sadly,they are busy. They can’t help us civilians. It is easy to look and say, “hey, we already have meteorologists just use those guys over there!” but “those guys over there” are currently working to protect our men and women in uniform protecting us across the globe.
It wouldn’t be prudent to have them refocus their efforts locally at the cost of not informing our military abroad.
Tommy Smith: Nick I had a friend that was manager of a refinery In Purvis and his boss Amarada Hess called him to tell him to fire 10% of his employees! He naturally protested that he couldn’t run the facility without the employees. Amarada said fire them and the rest will take up the slack and run the facility 100% without any problems. Same thing will happen here.
Perhaps true. There is a distinct difference between running a business and providing a service. Further there is a question of Marginal Returns of savings when cuts are to experts in a field. For example, if you run a construction business with 50 employees and you cut 10% of the staff, but of the five recently hired or promoted guys you fire… were your only roofers, you might have a bigger problem now than when you started.
The problem with arbitrary firings is that you don’t often evenly distribute the reduction in skill. In this case the reduction in skill was to a ton of areas where we need skill in order to protect folks when bad weather looms.
Adam Carmichael: It’s time to privatize the weather reporting. Heck y’all are wrong at least 50% of the time and nobody ever loses their job. The federal government was NEVER created to be as huge as it is.
This comment was not made in good faith, but I know many folks out there will read this and think, “I mean, he has a point. Just privatize it!” But we can’t. Even private companies (like mine!) rely on data, forecasts, and warnings from the NWS as a foundation for the work we do. Places like The Weather Channel, Accuweather, and all local TV stations couldn’t provide any meaningful forecasts without the help of NOAA and the NWS.
No private company is going to invest 11 billion dollars into a weather satellite to monitor hurricanes, forecast tornadoes, and input data into weather models to improve accuracy. The ROI for a business isn’t high enough for the cost of the investment given what you can charge a public for the information.
But when you spread that cost across the taxpayers of America it costs us all about three cents per day spread across three years, instead. The ROI on that is incredibly high.
Louis Rainey: Anyone can look at their phone and ask a computer what the weather is doing now days, that’s all I hear from meteorologist is what the computer model says, technology is the reason we don’t need all them folks anymore
I get where you’re coming from. it’s easy to assume that technology has automated everything. But the reality is, weather apps don’t make forecasts. People do. Wehter apps provide raw model data, which is often flawed.
On top of that, we still need people to maintain the computers, people to run the models, people to man the radar, and people to translate raw data into an understandable forecast. The difficult part about that weather app on your phone is that it’s relying on thousands of meteorologists, programmers, and technicians to make it work. You don’t see those people, but they’re there, making sure the information is accurate, up-to-date, and actionable.
The irony of automation is that the better it works, the more invisible the people behind it become. But they’re essential. Gutting these jobs doesn’t just remove redundancy—it removes the safety net that ensures weather information remains accurate, timely, and life-saving
Cheryl Harper Sanford: Losing your job is tough but it seems there may have been too many positions here that were unnecessary. Cutting ten percent of NOAA doesn’t sound too drastic.
Sadly, that is not the case. NOAA and the NWS are constantly under-funded. Each year they go to Congress and ask for X dollars and they get X minus Y% instead. And while a 10% cut doesn’t sound drastic at ace value, when you see what expertise was lost and where we lost it, it becomes a much larger problem.
A bit like I said previously in this post, if the cuts were specific and calculated, I don’t know that I would be as concerned. The concerning part was the arbitrary nature of these cuts and how it disproportionally impacts public safety.
And your local forecasters rely heavily (including me!) on the work of NOAA and the NWS.
As an example, I try to provide a seasonal outlook every Spring and Fall for the Winter and Summer for our area. I couldn’t do that without the work of NOAA and the NWS. They provide the data I use to make the forecast.
James Robert Pearce: Bloated staffing requirements in government has been a real issue swept away by politics for too many years. I’ll tell you what I always heard in the military; when different policies shifted manning. Do your job with less! Sometimes those are the realities we’re faced with.
I can’t remember a time when military funding was cut or we laid off 10% of the military. Furthermore, these are not servicemembers in uniform – these are civilians.
They have been doing more with less for a very long time. Weather forecasts continue to improve despite already being short-staffed. Warnings continue to get better, despite being short-staffed. Even surveying damage and helping the public with insurance claims has improved despite being short-staffed. But at some point, you tip the scale and we stop seeing improvements.
Rob Young: You forget about the Air Force & Navy with 1,000s of meteorologists, Weather models & Supercomputers.
As mentioned previously, they’re busy. And I don’t think (granted, this is just my opinion) that the military would be willing to send thousands of meteorologists over to cover weather stateside rather than protecting our armed forces overseas. And, honestly, I don’t want them to. They have their own mission to accomplish.
Jack Galt: Had to happen. If they’re really needed, they’ll be rehired. We have enough weather knowledge. We don’t need any more atm
Respectfully, this is about as short-sighted an argument as I’ve heard in a very long time. Holding aside the fact that forecasts are not perfect every time for every point in the future as proof that we don’t have enough weather knowledge, we still need these people to protect us in real-time from weather-related threats (like a tornado on the ground).
And, as I’ve said before, the way this was worded, they will not be re-hired.
Meghan Smith: Calm down. They will get their jobs back, I’m sure, if they are qualified.
They will not. Short of a large-scale change at OPM for who can apply for and receive a job offer for these jobs, once you are terminated from these roles, you cannot be re-hired.
