Reflections on a day of change

Thoughts on transitions at NOAA

Yesterday was one of those days that will be remembered as a demarcation line for the earth sciences community. More than 1,000 longtime employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) retired or otherwise left federal service yesterday, taking advantage of the Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA) and Voluntary Separation Incentive Program (VSIP) that was offered by the Department of Commerce. The amount of experience lost from the federal agency responsible for atmospheric, oceanic, and fisheries science in this country was massive, estimated at 27,000 years, and comes in addition to earlier staffing reductions from the “Fork in the Road” and termination of probationary employees.

NOAA is not a huge organization - prior to the reduction of the last few months it had about 12,000 federal employees, and at this point probably has around 10,000 - so as a NOAA employee you don’t know every colleague personally, but you probably only have one or two degrees of separation from each of them. The weather part of NOAA is even smaller, and our weather community as a whole is small and relatively tight knit. Although we come from diverse backgrounds, we all tend to share some common bonds. We are almost all weather geeks and have been since sometime in our youth. There’s typically some moment we can each point to when we became infatuated with weather and knew we wanted to be a meteorologist, and it’s not uncommon when a group of us are together, say having dinner at a conference, for the conversation to turn to how that happened for each of us.

We also tend to share a passion for public service and trying to do everything we can to help protect people from the impacts of weather and water hazards. Working for NOAA is obviously a public service job, but most people who go into meteorology do it with the idea that they are going to contribute to a better understanding of the atmosphere in order to help society. So whether you’re a National Weather Service forecaster, an Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) scientist, a university professor, or a broadcast meteorologist, you likely have that public safety drive somewhere in your being, and have a passion for doing things to educate and serve society at large.

So while yesterday was an emotional day for NOAA employees, I know that it also was for my colleagues throughout the weather enterprise. I have seen the social media posts of support and shared grief. For myself, yesterday had a very tangible emotional impact. For days my social media feeds have been a nearly continuous stream of longtime colleagues and friends announcing their retirement. In some cases it would be a recent co-worker who I knew was retiring, in others it would be someone I worked with early in my career whose retirement I was unaware of. But in each case, it made me stop and think about that person, how I knew them, and in most cases brought back shared experiences and usually some smiles - but sometimes a few tears.

Weather is a 24x7 phenomenon, and hence NOAA’s weather science apparatus is a 24x7 operation. When you work long hours with people as a team in the stressful environments that severe weather events provide, you build camaraderie that may not exist in other work environments. In my role as the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service office in Jackson, I worked with our team on Christmas Day issuing tornado and flash flood warnings while most people were home celebrating with families and opening presents. I also slept on the floor of my office while we all worked prolonged hours during Hurricane Katrina (and many other hurricanes and winter storms). And I spent many an 8 hour midnight shift with another meteorologist talking about weather and life while listening to Yacht Rock radio. These are shared experiences that not every profession can provide.

My story is not unique, it’s just mine. It’s shared by thousands of current and former NWS colleagues, and I know from working at the National Severe Storms Lab that many of my OAR colleagues could tell similar stories of being in a mobile radar with a colleague at 3 am in Louisiana while a hurricane was making landfall, or being with a colleague in a parking lot in rural Oklahoma releasing a weather balloon at midnight as a supercell thunderstorm was rapidly approaching. These experiences are what being a NOAA scientist is all about. Sharing them builds a sense of community and, indeed, family that while perhaps not unique, it is special and something I will cherish having been a part of for the rest of my life.

Mine is the generation being most impacted by this VERA/VSIP wave of departures. It is hard knowing that so many great and talented people that I worked closely with for so many years to build a strong public service science agency are stepping aside. It is especially hard because I know most of them would not be leaving now, and are doing so because in many ways they feel they have no choice, whether because of wanting to protect younger staff from the impacts of planned reductions-in-force or because of looming changes to the federal retirement system.

So the emotions are real: sadness, grief, and, yes, anger. And they exist not only because of the personal aspects I have focused on to this point, but also because of the real damage being done to the agency we all worked so hard to build. I have done a lot of media interviews in the last several weeks as a recent retiree who has experience in both NWS and OAR. Yesterday during one of these interviews, I was asked point blank if I am more worried now about whether or not my family and friends will receive a tornado warning in a timely manner than I was say 2 or 3 years ago. This really made me stop and think deeply - and unfortunately I have to say, yes, I am.

To be clear, this is not because I have any concern that the staff remaining at NWS doing operations or at OAR doing research is any less skilled or dedicated. I have 100% confidence they will do everything in their power to avoid any degradation of service. Having said that, I just cannot believe that you can lose the massive amounts of experience that walked out the door yesterday and not have it negatively impact the mission delivery of the agency. I personally know literally dozens of experienced, talented senior forecasters and managers who left the National Weather Service yesterday. Those people will no longer be there at 3 am when a tornado is threatening, will no longer be there to help train new staff on what to look for on radar for tornadoes with landfalling hurricanes, will no longer be there to share the experience that one gains from looking at weather every day for 30 to 40 years. So, yes, I do feel a little less safe today.

Careers have a natural progression, and it is not natural for hundreds of people around the same age and experience to all leave an agency at once. There is now a void in the corporate experience of NOAA that cannot be filled and which will continue to ripple for years to come. It is also an impact not felt equally across the agency. Some offices and entities have managed to go through this period relatively unscathed (so far), while others have lost their entire management team, like the Houston NWS office that I wrote about here. Again, I know that remaining NWS and OAR leadership will do what they can to keep meeting the mission - but when further cuts are on the horizon with no clear, tangible endgame in place, it is hard to not believe that we are taking a significant step backwards, at least in the near term.

I will finish with a modicum of hope. While I obviously deeply support the mission and people of NOAA generally and the NOAA weather agencies specifically, I will also say that I think a significant amount of change is needed to modernize and optimize the organization of NOAA’s weather operations and research entities. I do not believe that the current and proposed cuts to the agency are an effective way of spurring such change, but they are forcing change regardless. While the exact magnitude of budget cuts and organizational change coming to NOAA are still unknown, I hope that the weather community can work together to try to not only minimize the negative impacts but to also collectively determine how NOAA’s remaining weather resources can optimally serve society in the coming decades, and then work together to make that vision happen.