BalancedWx Special: Staffing and contract issues affecting NOAA/NWS

Services from forecasting to translation to severe weather research negatively impacted

One of my goals with this Balanced Weather Substack is to hopefully be able to bring some rational perspective to not only weather and climate communication, but also some of the real-world governmental and policy stories affecting the weather world. Obviously, there is a lot happening with the federal government right now. As someone who was in various NOAA management and leadership positions for more than 25 years, hopefully my knowledge of government bureaucracy and processes can help people better understand what the potential impacts of the current activities of the federal government might be on NOAA. Given that we are in the middle of an ongoing multiday severe weather event that would tax NOAA/NWS even in “normal” times, I think we need to take a break to talk about the current situation facing the agency and how I see the potential fallout.

Staffing is obviously a critical concern for NOAA and the NWS right now given recent job losses via the OPM “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation program and the dismissals of a number of probationary employees. NOAA saw a reduction of 1,300 employees over the last several weeks, and even though the firing of the probationary employees was stopped by the courts, those employees were placed on administrative leave and are still not working. NOAA staffing prior to the cuts was about 12,000.

Staffing reductions have already had tangible impacts on NWS services; on March 20th, the NWS announced the reduction of upper air data collection weather balloon flights at a number of sites as I discussed in this article. Today, NWS Louisville said in a statement to media partners as reported by WAVE-TV that “due to lack of available staffing and an active prolonged threat of severe weather and hydro concerns the next several days, NWS Louisville will likely not be able to send out staff to do damage surveys until after the weather…toward the end of the weekend.” This was after severe storms produced significant damage and likely some tornadoes last night, and given the staffing reductions noted above, this statement has brought additional attention to NWS staffing.

For some perspective, it is important to note that even in “normal” times, when extended periods of severe weather occur, NWS offices may have to delay damage surveys. While damage assessments after tornadoes are an extremely important NWS responsibility for any number of reasons (climatology, insurance industry needs, research, etc.), they do not take precedence over warning and forecast services for ongoing high impact weather events. Staffing levels at individual NWS offices vary, but on average most offices have somewhere around 15 meteorologists, and average a couple on duty most of the day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This level of staffing is what I was always told was “fair weather” staffing, i.e., the level of staffing to ensure that normal 24x7 operations could be maintained along with accounting for training, vacation, sick leave, etc. Severe weather operations, however, have a much greater staffing need, with as many as 10 of these people needed at one time during high end severe weather and flash flood events such as the NWS offices in Memphis, Louisville, Paducah and other offices were dealing with yesterday. When I was the meteorologist-in-charge of the NWS office in Jackson, we would often have multi-day high impact events where damage surveys would have to be delayed - or at least only the most severe damage surveyed - until the weather passed, as the “all hands on deck” staffing needed for severe weather operations limited availability for other tasks.

Having said that, obviously if staffing levels are reduced from normal, it will become even more likely that lower (but still very high) priority duties like damage surveys (or upper air balloon releases) will be delayed or even dropped. From ongoing contacts I have within the NWS, I understand the offices are trying to help each other by sending staff to nearby offices or taking on duties that can be done remotely, but of course as staffing shortages grow, even this become less effective. Northern Illinois University Professor Victor Gensini recently made a Facebook post analyzing the current staffing situation of the NWS. He is estimating that the current overall NWS field office staffing is down about 19%, which is more than double the “average” vacancy rate from 2015. 61 of the 122 weather forecast offices are critically understaffed, i.e., have a staffing shortage of at least 20%; at least three offices in Central Region of the NWS are down nearly 40% in staffing.

Clearly, when your staffing model is geared for fair weather staffing that is augmented by most or all staff working on overtime during severe weather, reducing that staffing level by 20 to 40% will not only negatively impact services, it will negatively impact the remaining employees. Having worked with NWS employees for 35 years, I know them to be incredibly dedicated people fully committed to their protection of life and property mission, and I have no doubt that they are working as much as humanly possible to meet mission needs. But when you have high impact weather events that go on all day and all night for multiple days, there are physical limitations. It is also crucial to understand that working through these events are incredibly mentally draining; issuing tornado warnings for hours is stressful, going out and seeing tornado destruction and having to talk to people whose lives have been destroyed is painful. One of the things that I felt it was important to do as a leader of an office was to try to reduce the amount of additional stress on my employees to enable them to do their mission critical jobs at as high a level as possible. I simply do not see how these serious staff shortages are not causing tremendous added stress to the staff at field offices, and that this is potentially jeopardizing mission critical tasks such as warning services.

Furthermore, current staffing levels are not the only added stress being placed on NWS and NOAA employees. NOAA is currently in the process of an additional voluntary early retirement/voluntary separation incentive program that is expected to result in significant additional staffing reductions across NOAA, including at NWS. Depending on how many people leave the agency with this program, it is then possible that a reduction-in-force will result in additional NOAA employees losing their jobs. So in addition to the stress from the current staffing shortages, employees are having to worry about future staffing reductions and the very real possibility they could lose their own jobs.

Unfortunately, there are yet more concerns and obstacles for NOAA employees. Even with a budget in place, new spending and contracting policies implemented by Department of Commerce leadership as reported by Axios are making it difficult for even mission critical purchases and contracts to be executed.

So it’s not bad enough you’re short staffed and facing potential layoffs, you also have to go out into the parking lot to a porta potty during severe weather to go to the bathroom when you can take a break from issuing tornado warnings.

Aside from these sorts of facilities issues, these contract policies are having tangible issues on NOAA services. The NWS contract with the private sector company that produced translations of NWS warnings and forecasts into other languages such as Spanish has lapsed, and the NWS announced the services were no longer being offered. During my time at the National Severe Storms Lab, the division I led conducted research into the importance of language and accurate translation in provision of critical warning services to the public. Dr. Joseph Trujillo-Falcon and his team published a recent paper about the December 10-11, 2021 tornado outbreak in Kentucky, and how language served as a barrier to life-saving information for Latinx immigrant populations. Joseph commented on BlueSky about the loss of NWS translation services.

Another area being seriously impacted by these contracting policy changes are computing contracts. As a science and technical agency, robust computing resources are critical for NOAA operations and research activities. Axios outlined some of the potential computing impacts in their article. Very recently I heard from a number of former colleagues that the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research’s (OAR) cloud computing contracts with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud were being terminated. This will have serious negative impacts on research and development activities in support of NWS that I was involved with at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. This includes that the R&D cloud version of the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) will be terminated, resulting in a stop of any new MRMS development work at NSSL. Additionally, this will have negative impacts on NSSL’s Warn-on-Forecast system research and development, and will likely result in a number of experiments and activities in NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed being canceled. Obviously, I am just speaking about the impacts I am familiar with, I am sure there are others across OAR. Important note 4/4/2025: Media reports and what I am hearing from colleagues indicate that the specific cloud computing contract discussed in this paragraph has been saved from cancelation, until at least July 2025.

As I said in an earlier Substack post, after 35 years of working for NOAA, NWS and OAR, I certainly do not think everything in these agencies are perfect, and I could point to many ways in which the agencies could be improved and to problems that I think need to be fixed. However, I also know that overall these agencies are staffed with tremendously dedicated professionals who are working hard to meet a critical public safety mission. From everything I saw before I retired last month, and from everything I am hearing from colleagues and seeing in reports, it is clear to me that NOAA and NWS are under serious strain, and the staff responsible for providing the life saving mission is under growing stress.

I know a lot of times that people have a perception that media reporting is sensationalized. While I do seem some occasional inaccuracies or misunderstandings in media articles about NOAA (which is why I feel it is important to share my perspective as someone with extensive real-world experience), I do not think the challenges facing NOAA are being exaggerated. In fact, I have very little doubt that the staffing and administrative challenges facing the agency right now are greater than at any other point during my 35 year career. Given that we still have months of peak severe weather season followed by what is forecast to be another active hurricane season, I think it’s important for the public to understand everything that is happening here. I will continue to provide periodic posts like this with additional thoughts and perspectives as things evolve and new information comes out.