NOAA oversees weather forecasting and is a major funder of weather and climate research. If these cuts — which an Office of Management and Budget document obtained by the Washington Post pegged at 17 percent agency-wide — materialize, they could significantly hamper improvements in weather forecasting and climate modeling and put the public at risk, experts warned.
“Any weakening of our technological, scientific, and human capabilities related to weather and climate places American lives and property at risk,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric science program at the University of Georgia and a former president of the American Meteorological Society, said in a Forbes blog post.
The proposal “is opposite to the ‘leave it better than you found it’ philosophy. This is take the money while you can, and let someone else in the future put Humpty Dumpty (aka NOAA) together again,” David Titley, director of the Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk at Penn State and a retired rear admiral in the Navy, said in an email.
The budget proposal is part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to beef up military spending by $54 billion and pay for that increase with cuts to other agencies. It has also proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s $8.2 billion budget by 25 percent.
NOAA’s annual budget is currently $5.6 billion, a small fraction of the federal government’s $1.2 trillion discretionary budget.
The largest cuts in the “passback” document, part of the White House budget proposal process, were slated for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (26 percent of current funding, or $126 million) and the satellite data division (22 percent, or $513 million), the Washington Post reported.
Several smaller programs, such as external research funding and work in coastal resilience, which provides funds for coastal communities to guard against storm surge and rising seas, would be eliminated entirely.
These proposals do not represent a final budget, as Congress ultimately decides on appropriations to agencies, but they have left many forecasters and climate scientists deeply concerned.
Individuals from across the weather and climate enterprise, from academic researchers to those who work in the insurance industry, took to Twitter on Friday night after the news broke, to express their alarm and concerns for the impacts such cuts could have.
“I simply could not do my job without NOAA data. It is invaluable to the insurance industry for proper risk management,” Bryan Wood, an insurance industry meteorologist, tweeted. “Any reduction to NOAA’s free-to-use services could lead to a rise in prices in any number of consumer-facing industries.”
“As a *private sector* meteorologist, I depend heavily on availability of data like this to do my job in *energy,*” Matt Lanza, an energy industry meteorologist, tweeted.
The OAR and satellite divisions are critical for maintaining and advancing forecasting and modeling capabilities in both the weather and climate spheres, experts said, and any cuts will curtail those capabilities well into the future.
Polar orbiting satellites, which aide in longer-term forecasting, are already facing problematic gaps, as funding shortfalls and planning delays have resulted in a delay in the launch of replacement satellites.
The Government Accountability Office included the polar satellite program and a potential coverage gap on its 2017 high risk list due to the challenges it already faces. The new budget zeroes out funding for the Polar Follow On program, which is developing the next polar satellites.
Modeling capabilities could also be impacted. For several years, some meteorologists and climate researchers have remarked that the U.S. is already behind European weather and climate modelling efforts, run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, which is investing more than $50 million in a new building to house a new, next-generation supercomputer.
“OAR is key to improving forecasting and modeling, and cuts to it will set back improvements to prediction and modeling that would have helped keep Americans safer from weather hazards. The Europeans get it, and they’re doing what they can to be leaders,” Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University and a former climate modeler at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, part of the OAR, said.
OAR also houses the bulk of the communications team that runs climate.gov, the main conduit for the federal government to share information about climate research. Perhaps more importantly, the office runs grant programs for research at local universities focused on applied research that links climate information directly with state and city planners. The expertise those grantees provide is critical to helping local climate adaptation efforts.
NOAA cuts could stymie research, put lives at risk – Salon