A Ph.D. scientist who issues tsunami alerts. A hurricane-hunting flight director. A researcher studying which communities will get flooded when a storm strikes.
They were among the more than 600 workers the Trump administration cut last week when it eliminated about 5% of the workforce at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“I was considered an essential employee, part of a 24/7 safety watch,” said Kayla Besong, a physical scientist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, which sends tsunami alerts. Until Thursday, she was part of a team of 12 that programmed the systems that determine whether parts of the U.S. coastline are at risk and issued alerts accordingly. Two people were required to be working at all times, Besong said.
The mass firing — of educated, specialized workers who viewed themselves as the next generation of scientists protecting life and property — could stretch NOAA’s workforce thin and hinder work on programs designed for public safety, former agency employees and leaders said.
Climate change is making weather disasters more common. Last year, NOAA counted 27 billion-dollar disasters, which resulted in the deaths of 568 people in the United States. It was the second-highest number since 1980, when NOAA began keeping such records, even accounting for inflation.
At the same time, meteorologists and forecasters say they’ve faced public vitriol and harassment despite increasingly accurate predictions. Some blame the politicization of climate change and the proliferation of conspiracy theories.
A White House official said “an extensive process” was conducted before the NOAA layoffs to ensure “mission critical functions” weren’t compromised. The cuts were part of the Trump administration’s mass firings of federal workers, which have spurred protests and legal challenges. Some researchers have warned that cuts to health and science agencies, in particular, could walk back or stall years of progress.
A NOAA spokesperson said the agency wouldn’t comment on the layoffs.
“We are not discussing internal personnel and management matters. NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public,” Susan Buchanan, a National Weather Service public affairs officer, said in a statement Thursday.
Former agency officials railed against the cuts, saying they threaten public safety during weather crises.
“Every office in NOAA was hit by these indiscriminate, misguided, ill-informed terminations,” said Rick Spinrad, the administrator of NOAA under President Joe Biden. “We’re coming into tornado season; hurricane season isn’t too far behind. We’re going to have, still, some winter storms. We’re going to have floods, droughts.”
Democrats in Congress, too, spoke out against the moves at a news conference Friday and at a rally Monday at NOAA headquarters.
“Without the warnings of extreme weather events, hurricanes, tsunamis, other things, people will die and others will suffer greatly, including huge property loss. And that’s why this is such an assault on our public safety,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said at the news conference.
Besong, 30, began her job as a physical scientist at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii in September. The center provides alerts to the military and U.S. embassies and issues them for vulnerable coastlines in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean. During tsunami events, Besong said, she would call military installations with information about risk and contact local emergency managers.
“I was using my skills to actively help people,” said Besong, who has a doctorate in atmospheric science. “You’re directly using your skills to improve systems that protect and warn against hazards.”
She added that tsunami alerts rely on complicated, bespoke computer programs that analyze seismic and tidal data.
“When there’s any large displacement in the Earth’s crust or water, we get notified and have to determine if there’s an earthquake large enough to create a tsunami or if a tsunami has been generated by other means,” Besong said. “I’ve been developing these skills for over 10 years. I’m an excellent programmer. Their systems are very niche, and they require people who know how to program.”
Even before the latest cuts, she said, the office was strapped for resources and needed to develop a new generation of workers.
“You do need a high level of expertise to understand and jump in on these systems,” Besong said, saying the job required a doctorate or a master’s degree and additional experience.
Like Besong, Andy Hazelton, a hurricane modeling specialist, also has a Ph.D. and spent years developing specialized computing skills. Hazelton helped develop NOAA’s next-generation hurricane modeling program, called HAFS, as an academic at the University of Miami.
He joined NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center on the October day when Hurricane Milton hit the Florida coastline, then was fired on Thursday. His work involved using supercomputers to advance hurricane forecasting.
“We’re working on the physical approximations, trying to make it more accurate, so the forecast error continues to shrink, the cone continues to get smaller and so the people who are going to get hit get more lead time,” Hazelton said, referring to the graphic that shows the probability of a hurricane’s path. “There’s a lot of expertise that got lost on this.”
The HAFS model indicated that both hurricanes Helene and Milton would intensify rapidly, which helped forecasters predict more powerful storms and get more strident warnings out, Hazelton said.
“We do work people use to keep themselves safe,” he said.
Some data that Hazelton’s models rely on is at risk, as well. Kerri Englert, a NOAA flight director and meteorologist, was also fired Thursday. During “hurricane hunter” missions, flight directors advise pilots about the safest routes and how to get the best data for modeling. Englert was onboard a “hurricane hunter” aircraft during hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton last year.
“We do put our lives on the line to go do these missions,” said Englert, a Navy veteran. “It is a passion. I have spent 10 years chasing after this job.”
Before the cuts, Englert said, NOAA had aimed to have 10 flight director positions filled. But after she and another were terminated, that left just six. Now, she said, if one flight director is sick, there will be fewer “hurricane hunter” flights.
During hurricane season, meteorologists rely on the one-of-a-kind data the flights gather, which feeds into hurricane models.
“It’s going to increase the uncertainty,” Englert said. “You’re looking at additional evacuations.”
Other fired workers were helping develop modeling tools that haven’t yet been rolled out at scale. The cuts may affect the tools’ quality and implementation timelines, they said.
Evan Belkin, a doctoral student at the University of Albany, was hired at the National Weather Service in 2023 as part of a program that allows people still finishing degrees to work at the agency.
He worked at the service’s Northeast River Forecast Center and in its weather forecast office in Albany, New York, until last week. He helped launch weather balloons and was part of a team building a flood inundation mapping tool.
The tool, still under development, is designed to model which areas in a community will flood in heavy rain, including the extreme events that climate change is making more likely. Early versions of the maps were distributed to some local emergency managers, Belkin said, and the goal was to expand the services nationwide by 2026.
The model accurately predicted that flooding in Montpelier, Vermont, in July 2023 would reach the state capitol building — Belkin visited to confirm the model got it right.
He was among several students and employees working on the tool who were let go, he said.
“When you don’t have people and bodies to verify how accurate the model depictions are, you’re not going to be successful,” Belkin said. “Without people and bodies, this flood inundation mapping project is going to go down the s----er.”
The cuts also reduced the number of meteorologists taking public calls and putting out forecasts.
On the morning he was fired, he said, Francis Tarasiewicz, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Rhode Island, started work at about 5:30 a.m., putting together four- to seven-day forecasts, as well as forecasts specifically for airports.
“We’re not the waste,” Tarasiewicz said.
Spinrad said at the news conference that every NOAA office had had reductions, including about 30% of the staff with the Office of Space Commerce.
“One of the functions of that office is to keep the roughly 30,000 objects in space from colliding with each other,” he said.
Spinrad also warned that the loss of workers would be likely to push back seasonal outlooks and hurricane forecasts.
“Some of those products may end up being delayed in delivery just because they don’t have the staffing power,” he said.
Some typical NOAA and NWS services went dark almost immediately.
Shortly after the firings, the National Weather Service office in Kotzebue, Alaska, said it would suspend releasing weather balloons.
NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory also said it would stop posting to social media.
“Due to a reduction in staff, NOAA GLERL’s communications services will be taking an indefinite hiatus,” it wrote on X.
NOAA’s external affairs team said on its website that the entire office had been eliminated.
“People’s lives are in danger. It’s not an exaggeration to say that. I’m worried. We’re coming up on tornado season, hurricane season, and that is just scratching the surface,” said Rachel Brittin, who until Thursday was the deputy director of the office. “These huge cuts to NOAA’s staff are going to affect the ability for NOAA to be effective.”
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