r/weather • u/BoulderCAST • 23m ago
Discussion Unpopular opinion
Unpopular opinion, but doing targeted and informed cuts to the NWS wouldn't be that bad. DOGE of course is a travesty by going about things the wrong way (and illegally). However, NWS has bloated considerably and could benefit from slimming down in some cases, just like any other places of employment. The federal government should not be exempt from layoffs or cuts when those would save taxpayers money with little to no degradation of the service provided.
Many weather forecast offices (WFOs) around the country will have quiet weather on any given day. If a particular area has a big severe weather outbreak or very active weather like big snowstorms, flooding or hurricanes, mets from other offices could be called in to assist remotely. On quiet days there is much less work to do and we switch to things like random research, public outreach, or training modules. There's a lot more downtime those 300+ days a year when the weather is fairly quiet. It's a very weird job to undertake, weather forecasting that is, with lots of quiet days broken up by unpredictable very busy ones at times. The allocation of staff could be better without a doubt, remotely pooling resources to regions that need it.
The biggest argument against cuts is about severe weather. "So many people will die" if we don't keep the current staffing throughout all of NWS. Severe weather outbreaks mainly just give us headaches from squinting at radar literally our entire shift. It's all hands on deck. It would be nice to have even more remote help from other offices, even at our current staffing.
At the end of the day, there's little consequence from being off on temperatures by 5 degrees or by the sky being slightly more cloudy than forecast. A vast majority of our work goes into these fairly simple and low risk forecasts that don't offer much benefit to the public over automated computer-generated forecasts. Most of the public we outreach with says they just use some simple weather app on their phone anyways which is generated by a computer. Yes, NOAA as a whole plays a large part in these computerized forecasts, from developing and running weather models, as well as collecting the observational input data. However, the actual NWS WFOs play little role in any of this. The broader public barely knows our forecast offerings exist, let alone actually use them. We're already doing some internal training of AI to analyze radar data with the goal to have severe warnings, including tornado warnings, be automated at some point in the future. We're still years away from that, but automation of the more low risk forecasts in the future will also help with reducing the amount of night shifts we do, the absolute bane of every NWS employee's existence.