A severe storm swept across the central U.S. overnight on May 16, bringing tornadoes to a region that has already been ravaged by them this spring.
At least 27 people in Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia have died, dozens more have been injured, and thousands of buildings have been damaged or destroyed.
It’s one of the most devastating storms to hit the region this tornado season, and more are likely to come. But as summer — which tends to be disaster season — approaches, meteorologists are raising the alarm over a growing crisis: It’s getting harder to predict the weather, and the reasons are largely political.
Since January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its subsidiary, the National Weather Service (NWS), have lost thousands of workers, either through layoffs or resignations as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal government’s workforce. Overall, NOAA has lost more than 2,000 workers, or about 20% of its workforce, in the last four months. According to a recent report in CNN, 30 of the 122 weather forecasting offices around the country — including the ones that cover major cities like New York, Houston, and Cleveland — currently lack chief meteorologists; a number of NWS offices around the country no longer provide 24/7 forecasting.
A reduced staff means fewer people collecting and analyzing the data we need to understand the weather and how climate change is impacting it. Historically, NWS offices across the country have performed coordinated weather balloon launches twice a day, at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m ET, providing meteorologists with granular data of atmospheric conditions at every level, but many sites have suspended or limited operations due to staffing shortages.
The NWS office in Jackson, Kentucky, for example, is one of the short-staffed offices that no longer routinely provides 24/7 coverage; staff there worked overtime to send out alerts and forecasts overnight on May 16. During a spate of tornadoes in April, the nearby Louisville office had said they wouldn’t be able to survey the damage or even confirm the tornadoes for a few days, a stark change from the tornado-chasing days of the past.
Data has disappeared in other ways, too: NOAA has halted the upkeep of polar satellites collecting critical data on atmospheric systems that affect weather around the world, downgraded snow and ice data, and recently killed a database that tracks the cost of weather and climate disasters around the country.
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All of this is part of the Trump administration’s larger war on measurement, which is itself a symptom of (and contributor to) a sense of the world becoming increasingly hard to comprehend.
There have been small wins here and there — the Agriculture Department recently restored climate data after farmers sued over its deletion, for example — but for weather and climate journalists around the country who rely on the weather service’s forecasts for their reporting, the cuts raise an important question: how do you report on the weather when the weather feels unknowable?
“Every single one of us, probably every single day, goes to our cell phone and opens up the weather app and sees what’s going on with the weather today, but a lot of people don’t understand what’s at stake,” said Paige Vega, climate editor at Vox. (Disclosure: The reporter of this article used to work on Vox’s climate team but left before Vega joined).
“Weather forecasts aren’t just to help you decide what to wear that day, or whether to take an umbrella to the beach, or to avoid the beach altogether one day,” Vega continued. “Weather forecasts save lives, and the National Weather Service issues weather alerts all the time when there’s going to be extreme weather hitting a place. The U.S. has a system that is the best in the world, but we’re actively sabotaging it.”
“The U.S. has a system that is the best in the world, but we’re actively sabotaging it.”Paige Vega, climate editor at Vox
National and local outlets use weather data in different but related ways. Reporters at national outlets like Vox often use high-level data to put climate change and extreme weather events into context; during the summer, the weather service’s constant updates and guidance for events like hurricanes, wildfires, and extreme heat help reporters and editors decide how to allocate resources and set coverage priorities.
Climate change is already making weather forecasting more difficult, and as data deteriorates it’ll be difficult to both predict how extreme weather might affect different parts of the country and report on the impacts of disasters once they hit.
At the local level, said Amber Sullins, chief meteorologist at ABC15 in Phoenix, reporters often use more granular data to help their audiences understand how the days and weeks ahead are looking; this is the sort of thing your local weather reporter turns to when making their forecast, and is especially impacted by the weather balloon losses.
“Frankly, I can’t keep up with the amount of data that’s going down,” Sullins told me. For now, she said, there are enough balloon launches happening that “everything I need to make a forecast is intact, or has a big enough Band-Aid on it that we are making do.” But she sees “a slow slide into degradation” ahead, and predicts that if more offices halt or reduce launches, “at some point it’s going to be gushing so quickly that the Band-Aid is not going to save us.”
Both Sullins and Vega said we’re in a particular period of uncertainty. Summer is still a month away, and most parts of the country should be spared from extreme weather for now. But it’s impossible to predict how a lack of forecasting will really play out until it actually happens; we’ve never before been in a situation where our understanding of weather patterns has gotten worse than preceding years.
Sullins is concerned that deteriorating data will also affect her team’s credibility, since most people don’t know how forecasting works.
When reporting temperatures, for example, her team can usually forecast possible highs and lows to within two or three degrees Fahrenheit. But if the models start deteriorating to the point where her team sees spreads of five or ten degrees Fahrenheit, she said, they’ll have to figure out how to communicate the uncertainty to their audience so as not to ruin their reputation for accuracy.
Audiences tend to trust local meteorologists — in January, Allen Media walked back a decision to consolidate forecasting operations after pushback from communities — but less-accurate forecasts could damage that relationship.
“There’s not much television meteorologists can do,” Sullins said. “We can try to plan for these things, but we’re not going to recognize [the full extent of the deterioration] until it’s in hindsight.”
Some meteorologists have discussed looking to weather models developed by European nations to help fill the gap, but it’s not a perfect solution. European models are still reliant on local weather balloon launches, and no amount of satellite imagery can replace them. Local weather systems are the manifestations of planet-wide forces, and knowing what is happening in the U.S. helps weather and climate researchers understand the effects of both individual weather events and climate change writ large.
As a stopgap, Vega and Sullins told me they and other journalists and meteorologists they’ve spoken with have been working to save personal copies of NOAA and NWS data before it disappears. Scientists and researchers around the world, including the environmental data repository Pangaea, which is based in Germany, have also been trying to create an open-access archive of disappearing data, but that is resource-intensive — weather data is incredibly storage-hungry, and exists on a scale that few, if any, organizations outside of the federal government have the capacity to operate on — and will quickly become outdated.
That’s why Vega thinks it’s important to help readers understand how weather forecasts work; people may love to complain about them, she pointed out, but until the cuts this year, the forecasts were more accurate than they had ever been before. Explaining the processes that go into them may actually save them.
“I have to think that if people began complaining about their weather reports, it would become a political issue much like the prices of their eggs at the grocery store,” Vega said. “It’s not the blockbuster story of the day, but those are both kitchen table concerns.”
Neel Dhanesha is a staff writer at Nieman Lab. You can reach Neel via email (neel_dhanesha@harvard.edu), Bluesky (@neeldhanesha.com), or Signal (@neel.58). Nieman Lab is part of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.