A meteorologist who has spent his career warning South Florida about hurricanes had a new warning for viewers last week: He’s not sure he can do it this year.
John Morales of WTVJ in Miami said the Trump administration’s recent cuts to the National Weather Service could leave television forecasters like him “flying blind” this hurricane season. “We may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline,” he warned.
Clips of Mr. Morales’s comments have spread widely: one posted on MSNBC’s TikTok account has nearly 4,500 comments, and news outlets around the world have written articles about what he said. (This isn’t the first time Mr. Morales has been the subject of viral attention: In the fall, his emotional reaction to Hurricane Milton’s rapid intensification also hit a nerve.)
Here’s what Mr. Morales had to say and more about what is going on with the Weather Service.
He warned of less accurate forecasts.
Mr. Morales’s presentation on Monday began with a clip of himself following the Category 5 Hurricane Dorian in 2019 as it moved over the Bahamas. He reassured his Florida viewers that the powerful storm would turn north before it reached their coastline. And it did, exactly when Mr. Morales assured anxious viewers it would.
The clip cuts to him in present day, slightly older and now wearing glasses. He recalled the confidence he used to have in delivering an accurate forecast to his viewers.
Grimly, he added: “And I am here to tell you that I am not sure I can do that this year, because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.”
He told of staffing shortages at the Weather Service’s Florida offices; “From Tampa to Key West, including the Miami office, 20 to 40 percent understaffed,” he said.
“The quality of the forecast is being degraded” because of those cuts, he said.
“Am I worried? You bet I am!” he added in a follow-up essay posted on the station’s website.
The Weather Service has indeed faced deep cuts.
Before this year, many offices were already understaffed. And since the sweeping cuts, part of the Trump administration’s effort to slash the size of the government’s work force, nearly 600 people have left the agency through a combination of layoffs and retirements.
The Weather Service has been scrambling to move people to its most affected offices, some of which have curtailed their weather balloon launches or are struggling to stay open at night. Last month, five of the agency’s former directors said that the cuts might lead to “needless loss of life.”
Like Mr. Morales, former Weather Service meteorologists and other experts have worried about fatigue. Brian LaMarre, who spent nearly two decades as the meteorologist in charge of the service’s Tampa Bay office, said he didn’t think people understood that many forecasters slept in the office during hurricanes while their families were staying at home or evacuating. Mr. LaMarre, like hundreds of others, retired this spring.
Some of the critics appear to have been heard: Last week, the Weather Service said that it had been granted an exemption to a governmentwide hiring freeze and that it would bring on more than 120 new employees to “stabilize” operations.
And on Friday, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives that would classify Weather Service forecasters and other staff members as critical public safety workers, making it difficult to fire them in the future.
We don’t know yet if forecast models have been affected.
Local TV meteorologists like Mr. Morales create forecasts by looking at computer forecast models. They also use forecasts that are pulled together by specialists at the National Hurricane Center, and other important warnings from Weather Service offices around the country. Some of those forecasts rely on data gathered by weather balloons to help determine the direction a hurricane will take.
James Franklin, who retired from the Hurricane Center in 2017, agreed with Mr. Morales’s warning: “You certainly could have as early as this summer a busted forecast and inadequate warnings because of the lack of data,” Mr. Franklin said.
But Andy Hazelton, a hurricane-modeling expert who was let go from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this year as part of the cuts, and other experts said it could be months before anyone knew with certainty if the forecast models have been affected.
He said NOAA’s model had a handful of “skill problems” in recent weeks, or a slightly degraded performance, but said it was difficult this early to pinpoint the cause. But, Mr. Hazelton said, “it’s not a great feeling to go into a hurricane season with this unknown.”
Vijay Tallapragada, who works on modeling for NOAA, said it wasn’t unusual for the models to have hiccups during spring, a transition season.
The models “always struggle with something or another,” he said, adding that it was “very hard to tell” if they were struggling because a particular piece of data was missing.
Bruce Ingleby, a senior scientist with the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, home to one of the most accurate global weather models in the world, has said he doesn’t think fewer balloon launches will change much.
Could fewer launches change the forecast model during the hurricane seasons? “A little bit,” he ventured.
About Hurricane Dorian …
Even if the forecasters are accurate, politicians can sometimes complicate things.
Hurricane Dorian hit during President Trump’s first term, and he took an interest in its path. On social media, the president posted a list of states that he said the hurricane would hit, partially at odds with the Weather Service’s forecasts at the time and contradicting the turn up the coast that Mr. Morales had assured his viewers the storm would take.
The tweet, a picture of a hand-drawn forecast track in the Oval Office and the subsequent fallout was soon widely known as “Sharpiegate.”
Judson Jones is a meteorologist and reporter for The Times who forecasts and covers extreme weather.
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