03/06/2025

How Will Hurricane-Prone Houston Be Affected by DOGE Cutting NOAA and Other Weather Service Jobs?

Houston Chronicle | Justin Ballard, Octavia Johnson | Feb. 28, 2025

How Will Hurricane-Prone Houston Be Affected by DOGE Cutting NOAA and Other Weather Service Jobs?

News broke Thursday that the Trump administration fired hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including National Weather Service meteorologists who provide local forecasts in cities across the country, like Houston.

However, the latest attempt by the White House and its Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to gut the federal workforce in pursuit of cost savings could have serious consequences for hurricane-prone Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast.

The job cuts at the nation’s weather and ocean science agencies are happening just as a new report shows that NOAA achieved record accuracy in tracking hurricanes and tropical storms last year.

Who is affected by the job cuts?

Job cuts at NOAA appeared to target about 1,300 people, or about 10% of its work force, Craig McLean, a former NOAA chief scientist, told the Associated Press. The first of two rounds of cuts focused on probationary employees, said McLean, who told the AP he got the information from someone with first-hand knowledge.

The National Weather Service, a subsidiary agency of NOAA that does day-to-day forecasting and monitors weather hazards, has about 375 probationary employees, the AP reported. Other agencies under the NOAA umbrella include the National Hurricane Center and the National Marine Fisheries Service, which conduct studies and monitor activity in the Gulf of Mexico.

Longtime Houston meteorologist Matt Lanza, a co-founder of the Eyewall and Space City Weather websites who now works with CenterPoint Energy, lamented the cuts in social media posts on X. “First, this makes the country less safe. Full stop. NWS offices were operating with staffing constraints (meaning they were already doing more with less). They are now operating doubly so,” he wrote. “This is going to lead to stress, burn out, risk for miscues, and critical tools breaking.”

He warned that NOAA weather data gathered by the agency’s employees “provides an outsized benefit to rural, more conservative communities compared to larger cities. … Word doesn’t travel as fast. The NWS, local EMs, and local TV mets work together to ensure it does.”

“No, your app cannot do what the NWS does. The majority of the data feeding it? Comes from NOAA. It doesn’t issue warnings, an NWS employee does,” Lanza wrote.

How will Houston forecasts be affected?

How these job cuts will affect the weather service’s role in providing daily forecasts and timely warnings in Southeast Texas is unclear, which is troubling because the state is about to enter its severe weather season, when thunderstorm, hail and tornado activity peaks during the year.

The Houston Chronicle reached out to the regional National Weather Service office in League City for details or any comment on the job cuts. The office referred all inquiries to NOAA’s public affairs office, which then responded with this brief statement:

“Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters,” the agency said. “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”

It added, “we continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission. Thanks for your understanding.”

What does this mean for hurricane season?

As the National Hurricane Center is in the final stages of its post-analysis from the busy 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, the agency found that mean track errors, or the average distance by which a hurricane’s predicted path differs from its actual path, broke accuracy records.

Every single forecast interval, from 12 hours to 120 hours, was the most accurate in its history. While yearly changes are bound to occur, the long-term trend is pronounced and shows a significant lowering in track errors since 1990. 

Preliminary data shows hurricane center meteorologists outperformed individual models and produced greater consistency in forecasts than global computer-driven models. The fate of those meteorologists, though, remains unclear amid the chaos and secrecy surrounding the DOGE-led job cuts to NOAA and its subsidiary agencies.

Five hurricanes last year made landfall along the Gulf Coast of the United States, with Helene and Milton lashing Florida’s Gulf Coast as major (Category 3 or stronger) hurricanes. While the final analysis of the 2024 hurricane season from NOAA is expected to be released this spring, early indications were pointing toward an overall trend in more accurate track and intensity forecasts.

But future hurricane forecasts and progress in accuracy will be “compromised” by the job cuts, said former NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad during a virtual news conference on Friday.

“I like to point out that NOAA’s ability to forecast hurricanes is based on the input from all at all components of NOAA, so the research gets compromised. That means the models will not improve,” he said. “But also, don’t forget that one of the most important aspects of NOAA’s improved capability for predictions of hurricanes is the data that NOAA collects from the hurricane hunters and from the observations at sea.”

With cuts being made to NOAA’s office of marine and aviation operations, he added, “it’s not clear whether the airplanes will be able to fly and the ships be able to go to sea, certainly not at the same kind of operational tempo as they have before.”

“And so the data that are collected from those ships and airplanes most likely will not be as abundant, and so the quality of the forecast is likely to go down to some degree,” Spinrad said.