Federal funding cuts could impact hurricane predictions

ASHEVILLE — Hurricanes are some of the most difficult weather phenomenon to forecast in part due to their large size and variety of hazards, but federal funding cuts could impact our ability to forecast these tropical weather events.

Here in Severe Weather Center 9, we use a suite of tools to take observations of the atmosphere to understand the environment a storm is heading into. Weather balloons are one of the most common ways that information is gathered.

“They give us a really good picture of the entire atmosphere from the surface up to about one hundred thousand feet,” said Mike Hopkins, the director of surface and upper air analysis with the National Weather Service.

Hopkins says these balloons are currently released at 90 of the 122 forecast offices across the country. But due to recent federal staffing cuts, he says the number of launches has been reduced. This means less data is going into our models.

“If you have good data to start with, you get a much better prediction,” Hopkins said.

Another useful tool we use in forecasting tropical storms and hurricanes are buoys in the ocean. Robbie Berg with the National Hurricane Center says buoys give us valuable information about the potential strength of those systems.

“Buoys are incredibly important because they help us understand how warm our ocean waters are ahead of a storm,” Berg said.

According to the proposed federal budget, the funding for NOAA would be cut by just under 2 billion dollars. That is about 27% of the NOAA budget.

NOAA says the program managing over a dozen buoys off the North Carolina and South Carolina coasts could be phased out.

Alan Sealls, who is president-elect of the American Meteorological Society, spoke with us about what the national weather service is facing.

“So it’s a scenario and not just for the research within the weather service but for the staffing where you’re trying to do more with fewer resources, fewer people, no additional funds, and that’s a recipe for stagnation,” Sealls said.

Another big part of our forecasting ability is access to historical records. Our history can tell us a lot about what could happen in the future when it comes to weather. We spoke with Deke Arndt, the director at the National Center for Environmental Prediction in Asheville, about how important data is to forecasters and meteorologists and why access matters.

“What our data does is describe where we’ve been and where we are. And it really provides the foundations for how big can the weather get,” Arndt said.

Arndt says that data-- along with those other measurement tools-- fuel our weather computer models. While the exact extent of the budget impact is yet to be seen, Sealls says this could eventually hurt our standing on the world stage.

“It’s not that we won’t see improvement in the models, it’s not that all of a sudden weather forecasts will be bad, it’s just that technically we will begin to lose our competitive edge as a country in creating literally world class models that other countries want to emulate,” Sealls said.

(VIDEO: Concord Electrical Systems team praised for quick response to Hurricane Helene damage)