The Future of NOAA and the National Weather Service, Part I

NOAA Headquarters in Washington

Today, the New York Times published an op-ed pertaining to the future of NOAA and the NWS. It was written by Dr. Ryan Maue, an extremely smart scientist (PhD in tropical meteorology) who served as Chief Scientist for NOAA during the first Trump Administration. You will find the op-ed here. It is an important read. Excerpts:

With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future...

Congress has piled more responsibilities on the agency, and the funding has not kept up. NOAA is spread thin, with a backlog of maintenance and upgrades that will probably take years to get through without significantly more sustained budget support.

Ryan believes that NOAA can be fixed. I am not optimistic that is the case. NOAA has become politicized which, in Washington, is terribly difficult to repair. Its tornado warnings are less accurate than they were a dozen years ago. It misses major storms: for example, it was too late recognizing the catastrophic flood threat in the Appalachians from Hurricane Helene. Its infrastructure is literally falling apart. 

Given civil service rules, I just can't see doing the same thing -- albeit with more money -- is the solution, regardless of who President Trump picks to lead the agency. I laid out my reasons in a recent interview with Andy Revkin, here.

I am going to answer some of the NYT readers' comments and concerns in a second part but there is one I want to comment on now:

"No other source of weather information has been as good." That's not even close to being correct -- which easy to determine for yourself. Go to Forecast Advisor and enter your Zip Code. Rarely is the NWS even in the top three, let alone the leader. And, this is the root of the problem. Incremental change -- when the agency is 30 years behind the European weather agencies -- is unlikely to be successful. 

But, change must occur or the National Weather Service will continue to fall behind! This is a vital issue for the safety and security of our nation.

Below, you will find my November 11 essay on fixing the increasingly stressed and failing National Weather Service, reprinted in full. 

Part II will be published tomorrow. 

---- For Convenience, My Original November 11 Posting on Future of the NWS -- 

NWS National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, Maryland

I wish to offer suggestions to President-Elect Trump pertaining to NOAA and the National Weather Service (NWS) as vital changes are required in going forward. Some types of NWS forecasts are getting less accurate and we have fallen to 4th place in terms of the quality of our meteorological computer models.

While a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) may have seemed like a good idea in 1970, in practice it has been a disaster for meteorology. There has not been a weather-oriented administrator in 50 years (!). The current administrator shows zero interest in the NWS’s problems and is starving it of resources. When President Trump, during his first term, attempted to appoint an administrator who was focused on weather, he was slimed by marine interests (plus some anti-Trump people in general) who didn’t want their fiefdom disrupted. 

Worse, NOAA has succumbed to global warming advocacy and its products are polluted by that stance. For example, it’s “Billion Dollar Disasters” is nothing but propaganda (see here and here). When Congress was interested in funding badly needed gap-filler radars for the NWS, NOAA – astonishingly – said no. 

It is past time to break up NOAA. I don’t have enough expertise to offer suggestions as to what to do with the marine part of the agency, except to say “good riddance.”

For weather and climate, the 

• National Weather Service, 
• NESDIS (National Environmental Data and Information Service; which runs the satellite and other data collection sources and then makes the data available to anyone who wants the data), 
• NOAA Labs like the National Severe Storms Laboratory,
• Perhaps the government’s drought program,

should be made into a new standalone agency (call it the, umm,“Weather Bureau”?) that is, by law, out of the global warming business. 

Please do not misinterpret: the new agency’s data should be world-class. If that data supports rapidly rising temperatures, fine. But, today’s NOAA gives, for example, $10 million grants to unaccountable ‘nonprofits’ for ‘environment education’ and other ‘progressive’ nonsense that, not so coincidently, is always on the side of global warming advocacy. That needs to stop whether NOAA is broken up or not as it is a built-in conflict of interest with scientific ethics. Meanwhile, the NWS is so money-poor it can't even launch routine weather balloons in all of the locations where needed. Ten million dollars would alleviate that problem. 

The Weather Bureau (I’m partly joking with the name) should be an independent federal agency like NASA. It should support other federal agencies’ weather needs (i.e., National Forest Service fighting forest fires) and the public-at-large. It should be forbidden, by law, to serve special interests. Actual examples of things the NWS is doing or has done:

• Set up websites, updated weekly, for college football teams.
• Format data for specific users, for example, the wind energy industry.
• Send meteorologists to NASCAR races (especially during tornado watches when that manpower is needed to serve the public).

The Weather Bureau should make 100% of its data available in the most timely way possible and it should be formatted in standard data formats. 

The Bureau should be adequately funded to install new radars --  including gap fillers -- across the nation, purchase all (instead of partial) aircraft and private-sector satellite weather data, add additional weather balloon stations (including at least two automated stations on abandoned Gulf oil platforms) and operate the balloon stations currently on hiatus, et cetera. There should be adequate funding to conduct weather measuring flights (Pacific atmospheric rivers, hurricanes, winter storms) when needed. The ”not made here” NWS culture must be rooted out. As others have pointed out, the NWS is thirty years behind in some aspects of weather forecasting. 

The future may require, proportionately, more technicians than meteorologists. And, the training for existing and future meteorologists must change, radically. There is an objective that meteorologists should be able to intervene and change a forecast when the computer forecasts are obviously wrong. But, as aviation safety has learned, there is no way for people to overrule defective automation output when they have little or no experience doing so. 

The burned out passenger cabin of Asiana 214

An analogy: Why did Asiana Airlines Flight 214 crash in 2013 in clear weather on approach to San Francisco International airport? Because the pilot had not ever attempted to hand fly (e.g. without automation) a 777 during landing! Three died, 180 were injured, and a jumbo jet costing $440 million was destroyed. That is a close analogy to a meteorologist making an accurate intervention when it looks like the models are badly off. How can we expect them to make independent (of models) forecasts when they have no experience doing so?

There hasn’t been enough human factors research in weather forecasting. What little that has been done (primarily by Dr. Tom Stewart) brings up a serious issue: More models make meteorologists feel more confident but they do not improve accuracy! Yet, in spite of that finding, the NWS keeps increasing the number of models available to its forecasters. 

My suggestion is for the Weather Bureau to establish an advanced forecasting school that over about 4-6 weeks both teaches and gives experiences in extreme weather forecasting without models to its team. And, it should do this quickly before the generation of meteorologists who know how to make this type of forecast passes away.

The NWS employees’ union’s agreement that forecast and warning accuracy may not be used when considering meteorologists for promotion or as part of an annual forecast review needs to be ended immediately! Having run a commercial weather forecast and warning operation for 35 years, I would also:

• Like FAA air traffic controllers, what the NWS does is life-saving. Their pay for those functions should reflect that responsibility and the civil service rules should be modified accordingly.
•  Stop rotating shifts. Ask for volunteers for off-hours shifts (pay a little more). Rotating shifts are hated by all and research demonstrates they shorten life spans. There are people who prefer to work at night. Let them. But, if there are not enough volunteers, assign meteorologists to work at night six months at a time. Research shows this is much healthier than rotating. 
• Teach the people who manage the NWS workforce genuine management skills, not DEI. DEI should be purged immediately. 

The Weather Bureau should no longer do original meteorological modeling. The past 30 years have demonstrated it is terrible at it and the Bureau will get better models, faster, by relying on outside organizations like the National Center for Atmospheric Research. However, there should be a group of line forecasters who set the goals for new models. Right now, by the time meteorologists get used to a new set of models, another modification comes on the scene requiring the forecasters to go back to square one. Better forecasts for the public will result from better ways of exploiting existing models (AI, human techniques, etc.) more than by frequent tiny tweaks to the models themselves. 

National Center for Atmospheric Research

There are those wanting to do a reorganization of the NWS which would result in many fewer forecasters and more specialized forecast centers. Because I do not know the details, I don’t feel comfortable commenting. However, my instinct tells me that this may not be a good idea. Let’s try optimizing what we have rather than tearing everything up again (as was done in the 1990’s).

Finally, the legislation needed to break up NOAA and set up the Weather Bureau should include my proposed National Disaster Review Board (NDRB). In addition to studying the forecasting and response to natural disasters and publishing reports as to best practices and what went wrong, the NDRB will independently keep the accuracy statistics for Weather Bureau storm forecasts and warnings. The NDRB and the Weather Bureau are both complementary and essential.

There’s a real opportunity here to improve weather forecasts and storm warnings. Not only do storm warnings save lives, studies have conclusively demonstrated that better forecasts have tremendous economic value. The money invested in the “new” Weather Bureau will pay off dozens of times over.