On Friday, the Washington Post published an article concerning a memo drafted by the Office of Management and Budget for the 2018 fiscal year. This memo proposed drastic cuts to NOAA that would lead to a 18% reduction in current funding. At a time when U.S. numerical weather prediction is falling behind the rest of the world, satellites are approaching the end of their lifespans, and many local NWS offices are already overworked and understaffed, this is the very last thing that needs to be cut from our federal budget.
Dr. Cliff Mass from the University of Washington wrote a great blog that that breaks down the specifics of this proposal and its ramifications for weather prediction and communication in the United States. I highly suggest you read his blog here. In this blog, I’ll give you a brief overview of some of the programs that are proposed to be cut or slashed, but I’ll spend the majority of the blog making an economic case for why NOAA’s budget should be considered an investment and not a cost.
The programs that would be most affected by this cut would be NESDIS (National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service) and the OAR (Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research). NESDIS is the organization in NOAA chiefly responsible for geostationary (and to a lesser extent, polar-orbiting) satellites and the archival of environmental data through the NCEI (National Center for Environmental Information). Remember that awesome satellite that I’ve blogged about several times over the past few months? That was the first in a series of next-generation geostationary satellites (GOES-R) slated to replace our aging and technologically inferior geostationary satellites. A cut to NESDIS would jeopardize the potential for the GOES-R program to be completed and would give us far less meteorological data to assimilate into models, giving us a less complete state of the atmosphere and resulting in poorer model initializations and subsequent performance.
The OAR is composed of 7 research laboratories, 16 cooperative institutes with research universities, and various NOAA offices and programs that help manage these labs/institutes and foster research opportunities. One of the laboratories, the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL), is headquartered right here in Seattle, and the the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) is the University of Washington’s cooperative institute with NOAA.
Trump proposed a 26% cut to the OAR, which would include entirely eliminating its SeaGrant program with various research universities. And while much of the OAR focuses on climate change and air quality (things Trump doesn’t appear to be interested in fixing/improving), it does a significant amount of research on things outside these realms, including severe thunderstorms/tornadoes via the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. And all of the research laboratories and institutes do some sort of work on improving numerical weather prediction via their study of the physical, chemical, and biological processes that are responsible for our weather and climate.
The National Weather Service would get cut by 5%, significantly less than either NESDIS or the OAR. Unfortunately, the NWS offices are already understaffed, and budget cuts would mean layoffs for local forecasters. Though I can’t say for sure, I would assume that layoffs would result in an even heavier workload for the remaining forecasters and would give them less time to spend interacting with the public. And as we’ve seen this past winter (particularly with the Ides of October storm), we need to be dedicating more resources towards forecast communication, not less.
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The Trump Administration says these cuts are needed to offset the proposed increase in military spending. However, as I will show, federal expenditures related to weather prediction and communication should be considered investments, not costs. To illustrate this, let’s use Portland’s January 10-11th snow event as a case study.
Snowman builder: Gabriel Graff on January 10, 2017
On January 10, the Portland NWS forecast 1-4 inches of snow for the Portland metro area as low pressure system moved into the Central Oregon Coast, spreading warm frontal moisture to the north while keeping the Portland area below freezing. Snow advisories and winter storm warnings were posted throughout the area, and the NWS highlighted the potential for a very difficult Wednesday morning commute.
But the front was stronger and moister and the atmosphere significantly more unstable than modeled. As a result, when this front swung through, it strengthened dramatically, causing extremely heavy snowfall rates of 1-3 inches per hour and even some thundersnow! By the time it was all said and done, close to a foot of snow had fallen across much of the metro area. And because roads were not salted before the storm and temperatures stayed below freezing until the 17th, the city was essentially shut down for a week.
Credit: Portland NWS
Any time you get a foot of snow in a city woefully unprepared for major snowstorms like Portland, the impacts are going to be severe. But a more accurate forecast with ample lead time could have allowed Portland to borrow some of Seattle’s snow equipment and salt the roads, making them much easier to clear after the snowstorm. Though it is impossible for me to know how much money a more accurate forecast would have saved, when you factor in the lost economic productivity due to offices/schools closing and shipping delays, it is likely in the tens of millions of dollars. There is a huge economic incentive for better weather forecasts.
While I could not find any official estimates for damages caused by the January 10-11th snowstorm, 2016 as a whole had the second-highest number of billion-dollar weather disasters on record. There were 15 individual billion-dollar weather/climate disasters that led to a combined 46 billion dollars in damage and 138 fatalities through 2016, including three devastating floods that hit Texas and Louisiana between March and August 2016. More accurate forecasts and communication would help decrease damages and save lives by increasing emergency preparedness. Cutting NOAA’s funding doesn’t change the weather, but it will make us more vulnerable to severe weather.
Credit: NCEI
And though 2016 had numerous weather disasters, other recent years were far deadlier and more expensive. 2005 alone had over 200 billion dollars in damages and 1,451 deaths, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and numerous other major hurricanes. Current models have insufficient resolution to properly model hurricane intensity. When you realize how destructive severe weather is, it is surprising how little we spend on improving numerical weather prediction/communication and repairing vulnerable infrastructure.
Credit: NCEI
Please call/email your senators and representatives to tell them that cutting NOAA’s budget would make America more vulnerable to severe weather.
Here is a sample email you could use.
“Hello Senator ______,
I am writing about the proposed budget cuts to NOAA by the Trump Administration.
Severe weather costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. These budget cuts would severely hamper our ability to make progress on improving United States numerical weather prediction and forecast communication. The money saved by these budget cuts would likely be overshadowed by the economic damages from our decreased ability to properly forecast, communicate, and prepare for severe weather and could even cost lives.
Thank you so much for your time!”
Feel free to share this blog and my contact information with them as well: my email is charlie@weathertogether.net. I’ve included some from around the Pacific Northwest.
Washington
Senators:
Maria Cantwell:
Phone: (202) 224-3441
Email: www.cantwell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email-maria
Patty Murray:
Phone: (202) 224-2621
Email: www.murray.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contactme
Representatives:
District 1: Suzan DelBene: (202) 225-6311
District 2: Rick Larsen: (202) 225-2605
District 3: Jamie Herrera Beutler (202) 225-3536
District 4: Dan Newhouse (202) 225-5816
District 5: Cathy McMorris Rodgers (202) 225-2006
District 6: Derek Kilmer (202) 225-5916
District 7: Pramila Jayapal (202) 225-3106
District 8: David G. Reichert (202) 225-7761
District 9: Adam Smith (202) 225-8901
District 10: Denny Heck (202) 225-9740
Oregon
Senators:
Jeff Merkley:
Phone: (202) 224-3753
Email: www.merkley.senate.gov/contact/
Ron Wyden:
Phone: (202) 224-5244
Email: www.wyden.senate.gov/contact/
Representatives:
District 1: Suzanne Bonamici (202) 225-0855
District 2: Greg Walden (202) 225-6730
District 3: Earl Blumenauer (202) 225-4811
District 4: Peter DeFazio (202) 225-6416
District 5: Kurt Schrader (202) 225-5711
Idaho
Senators:
Mike Crapo:
Phone: (202) 224-6142
Email: www.crapo.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm
James E. Risch:
Phone: (202) 224-2752
Email:www.risch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=Email
Representatives:
District 1: Raul R. Labrador (202) 225-6611
District 2: Mike Simpson (202) 225-5531
If I didn’t include your state, my apologies! These are where most of my readers are from. You can find your senator here and the representative for your district here.
6 Comments
WONDERFUL post Charlie!!! I agree wholeheartedly with your “investment economics” view of weather services.
Of course, for the past 20-plus years Republican Party ideology has been dominated by the capitalism-always-good-government-always-bad mentality. Rather than seeing the two spheres as complementary to each other, as most trained economists do. There are things that central governments totally stink at doing, and there are some things where government blows the private competition away. The American public needs to understand this basic fact of economic science.
When it comes to weather forecasting…we have two real weak spots in the PNW. One is the lack of an Oregon coast radar. The other is the Columbia Basin winter inversion mechanism. Particularly for Portland, both of these come into play in potential snow/ice storms. The models kept trying to push the cold air out of the Columbia Basin during December through mid-February, but time and time again the stubborn low-level airmass and high pressure ran circles around the forecasts.
Better modeling of the relationship between sun angle, airmass temps and inversions east of the Cascades will go a long way toward improving our forecasting between October and March.
Hey Karl, thanks so much for the compliments! I’m not a trained economist, but my understanding of capitalism is that it works great when there is competition. When things turn anti-competitive, wealth inequality skyrockets, prices go up, and capitalism fails to function properly. That’s why government has the authority to break up monopolies.
We need something like the National Weather Service to provide “official” warnings people can trust. If the Weather Channel issues a tornado warning based on doppler radar signatures but Accuweather doesn’t, who are you going to trust? Competition doesn’t work here – it could cost lives.
What’s really frustrating is even the GOVERNMENT seems to be playing this “competition game” with our tax dollars. Just look at the Department of Defense… the Navy (NOGAPS) and Air Force (previously WRF, now UKMET) operated in separate spheres, with little collaboration. The NOGAPS is an inferior model compared to the GFS, and the fact that the Air Force ditched an American model for a British one is just plain depressing. These organizations are acting like private enterprises with trade secrets… the only difference is we are funding them in doing so. I could go on and on… there are way too many hurricane models, and I believe we should decommission the NAM. Bottom line: it makes far more sense to have one excellent model than a than a few good ones and a ton of mediocre ones.
At the Pacific Northwest Weather Workshop, Cliff Mass actually talked about the tendency for the WRF to overmix, especially in Portland during Columbia River Gorge outflow events. This was because like most models, the model layers of the WRF contour terrain, and the mixing in the model physics was occurring on these sloped layers, resulting in more vertical mixing. There was an option to have purely horizontal mixing in the WRF, but there was a bug in this and it didn’t run. It was FINALLY fixed earlier this winter, and when the UW implemented this feature, the tendency to overmix cool Gorge flow in the Portland Metro area was MUCH less. The current WRF from the UW now uses the horizontal mixing option.
Excellent info, especially about the economic impacts. Weather disasters are likely to become more common, so we should be investing more in forecasting, not less.
Thanks Joel. Yes, climate change will bring an increase in the severity and/or frequency of many types of severe weather, particularly heat waves (and fires), hurricanes, floods, and droughts. Weather disasters cost the US tens of billions of dollars of damage each year… funds dedicated to better models, forecasts and subsequent preparation could pay off with a single storm!
And our new EPA chief continues to spout nonsense. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/09/on-climate-change-scott-pruitt-contradicts-the-epas-own-website/?utm_term=.01a0f98e6a02
Thank you Charlie for the push. I will be writing our congressional delegation as soon as I get done with my term papers!
Thanks Sara! And yeah, get those term papers done! 🙂