BalancedWx Special: NOAA funding updates
Some glimmers of good news...but lots of threats remain
One of the things that I intend for this Substack to be is, well, balanced. So while I have written several special updates in recent weeks that talked about the bad (at least in my view) news of various threats to NOAA, I want to be sure to share positive news when it exists. So here are a couple of positive developments that have happened in the last 48 hours.
Return of translated NWS products
As I discussed back in an early April post about NOAA staffing and contracting issues, the contract that the National Weather Service company had with a private company to produce translations of its warnings and forecasts into other commonly used languages lapsed. This resulted in the termination of this service. NOAA Communications announced on social media this morning that the contract has been restored, and that translated products should be available again no later than the end of the day Monday, April 28.
Recent social science research has shown the importance of translated warnings in risk communication to non-English communities. Dr. Joseph Trujillo-Falcon led research at the National Severe Storms Laboratory and University of Oklahoma after the December 2021 Mayfield, KY that showed how language was a barrier to people receiving warning information during this event. Another example is work that NOAA Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant has done on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with Vietnamese-American communities demonstrating the need for weather information in Vietnamese for these populations.
I was able to have some small involvement in social science research projects like this during my time at the National Severe Storms Lab, and they are important to the weather and disaster communities because they can find gaps that exist in our risk communication system. This translation contract is an excellent example of where a gap was found by research, and NWS was able to fill that gap with an operational initiative. It is excellent news that this service was able to restored.
NOAA Regional Climate Center funding restored
About a week ago, the websites of four of the six NOAA Regional Climate Centers went dark after the university grant funding supporting those four centers expired. Regional Climate Centers serve important roles by providing the public “sector-specific and value added” climate data and services. This means they provide sectors like agriculture and business with climate information tailored to the needs of those groups in the various regions they serve.
Earlier this week, each of the four dark websites came back online with a notice stating that the funding for their RCC had been restored (example from Midwest Climate Center shown above). While this is obviously good news, it must be stressed that this funding action was simply to restore already appropriated current year money. Funding for the Regional Climate Centers was proposed to be eliminated earlier this month in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) FY2026 budget passback document for NOAA. If this funding elimination were to happen, this week’s RCC restoration would just be a temporary reprieve, and once current funding runs out the sites would again go dark and the RCCs would close.
Latest on NOAA budget
So that brings us to less positive territory, namely discussions of the NOAA budget and specifically the OMB passback document. As you can read about in much more detail here, OMB called for severe cuts to NOAA, including elimination of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR, NOAA Research), NOAA Sea Grant, and significant changes and reductions to NOAA’s geostationary satellite program. Today is the initial deadline for NOAA to provide OMB with responses to several directives in the document, including: how NOAA plans to adjust its budget structure in response to remaining NOAA Research programs transferred to other line offices; how NOAA plans to effectuate the move of the NWS Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) to the Department of Homeland Security; and what legal obstacles NOAA sees for making the OMB outlined changes to the geostationary satellite program.
As I discussed in the article about the OMB passback, while the document is nominally the administration’s budget proposal to Congress for FY2026, there is also language in the document that states intent to begin implementation of the proposed actions immediately in alignment with administration priorities. Given the passage of today’s deadline, one can assume we should start seeing in the coming days signs of how the administration plans to proceed with starting any implementation.
Just in the last few days, a number of new media stories have come out regarding potential impacts from the budget cuts outlined in the passback. This includes a Politico article about the proposed elimination of the NOAA Cooperative Institutes (CIs), and a ProPublica story about the proposed elimination of the NOAA federal research labs with a particular focus on the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). Needless to say, the translation research projects I discussed above are the type of projects that would be severely reduced or eliminated if the passback budget is executed, along with the closure of the RCCs. The implications of these proposed budget cuts are to NOAA and the broader meteorological and earth science communities are truly profound, and I will continue to provide updates as I learn more.