NOAA funding cuts impact weather reporting
CORRECTION: A correction was made to this article reflecting the fact that Kitty Sopow was fired from NOAA. She did not voluntarily retire. NOAA had wrong paperwork on her file, listing her as a Pathways Intern and all Pathway Interns were fired.
In the aftermath of the loss of Bering Air Flight 445, Washington D.C. politicians held a press conference on flight safety in Alaska. On February 11, all three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation joined with Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Federal Aviation Administration Acting Administrator Chris Rocheleau and Chair of the National Transportation Safety Board Jennifer Homendy to speak to problems and possible solutions in Alaskan air safety.
Improved weather reporting was specifically noted at the time as an important way to make Alaska’s aviation safer, but since then, budget cuts have left Western Alaska with even fewer weather reporting resources. “We cannot normalize the fact that we are accepting half a safety system,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski at the time, pledging to improve weather reporting in rural Alaska.
As the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by unelected tech billionaire Elon Musk indiscriminately slashes government agencies’ budgets claiming to root out fraud, waste and bloat, many federal government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, began mass firings of employees. In a first wave of lay-offs people took the offer to retire early. Last week, a second wave of NWS staff was fired, most of them probationary workers, including at the Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer.
The only National Weather Service employee in Nome, social scientist Kitty Sopow was fired. One NWS employee in Bethel was fired during cuts, and Western Alaska now has no permanently assigned National Weather Service employees, according to Alaska Climate Specialist Rick Thoman, although there are still technicians who come to Nome from Anchorage to work on equipment. The closest NWS employee is now in Fairbanks.
“The reduction of forecasters in offices that have been short-staffed for years, continuing overwork of remaining forecasters will result in lower quality forecasts, watches and warnings,” said Thoman. He also predicted longer equipment outages, including to the NOAA weather radio and Tsunami equipment, and outages on tide gauges and ocean buoys.
There have been other cuts as well. Several communities in Western Alaska host NWS upper-air weather observation stations. Through an automated system, weather balloons are launched twice a day and record a variety of data, including winds that can be used for aviation, and temperature inversion. All that data is fed into weather models around the world.
Kotzebue and Utqiagvik had the only two upper-air weather observation stations north of the Arctic circle. Last week, Kotzebue’s program was cut because of low staffing. While the balloons are launched automatically, there was no one to do maintenance.
“The loss of upper air observations will degrade the performance of weather models run every day all around the world,” said Thoman. “Between the termination of the Kotzebue upper air program and loss of staff at Nome and Bethel, Saturday night through Monday morning there were no weather balloon observations in western Alaska between King Salmon and Utqiaġvik.”
Six months ago, Congress passed an FAA Reauthorization Bill that included several provisions for Alaska. They included the “upgrade and maintenance of weather observing systems” and maintaining the Contract Weather Observing Program, which uses human observers.
“In communities that experience severe weather, having a dedicated, on-site meteorological professional to record and interpret weather data is incredibly important for pilots and air carriers,” said a press release about the bill released by Sullivan’s office.
Long before all the cuts, many Alaska weather stations did not report regularly. The Nugget reports weekly on the status of regional FAA weather stations, and each week, some are either not reporting or are “intermittent” in their reporting.
“In most (not all) cases the problem is not with the weather station itself but with the telecommunications that connect it digitally to the rest of the world,” said Thoman. “I’m told by people that know about this that the problem is multi-faceted: 1990s vintage hardware with both the local phone company and the connections.”
Thoman gave an analogy: If you had a weather station at home with both a display and an internet connection, it could tell you the weather at your kitchen table and it could broadcast it to the world. If the internet went down, the weather station would still work, but you could only see it from your table.
“Same with the FAA stations: usually they are working when not reporting, but the only way to get the current observations is to call the voice line or on frequency for pilots. And there’s no way to find out what it was doing in the past, so no way to know if it’s getting better or worse,” said Thoman.
The Nugget asked the Alaska Congressional Delegation for their reaction to the cuts.
Congressman Begich’s staff responded the Nugget’s inquiries saying that Begich was traveling and not available for an interview. “We are closely monitoring the reported terminations of NOAA employees in Alaska and actively gathering more information on the scope and impact of these staffing changes,” said a spokesperson for Begich. “Ensuring the safety of Alaskans whether it be for aviation, fisheries, or weather forecasting—is a top priority for our office.”
“I have spoken to Secretary Duffy often and he has assured me that we have a shared focus on enhancing aviation safety in Alaska,” said Senator Sullivan in a statement to the Nugget on February 25. “In fact, the secretary called me yesterday and told me he’s directing the FAA to begin testing the use of Starlink satellites in Alaska to help improve the reliability of our weather information systems.”
The FAA later announced that it had begun testing Starlink at three “non-safety critical sites” in Atlantic City and Alaska. The agency said it had been considering using Starlink since the Biden administration.
Asked whether that Starlink connection had gone through the regular government procurement process, no member of the delegation responded. Starlink is part of SpaceX and owned by Musk, who on behalf of President Donald Trump heads DOGE with the goal to end government waste and corruption. Currently, Verizon has a contract to upgrade the FAA’s critical infrastructure. Musk criticized the Verizon system as “not working” and “putting air travelers at serious risk” on X, before correcting himself that it had not yet been implemented.
In response to the Nugget’s request for comment on the cuts to NOAA, Senator Murkowski said, “You can’t cut jobs at NOAA and not expect it to impact NWS’s ability to provide accurate forecasts for the Port of Nome’s harbormaster to warn commercial ships about dangerous weather. You can’t expect better aviation safety when you cut the FAA. I support finding efficiencies in the operations of government, but we need to do it responsibly, thoughtfully, and within the confines of the law.”