Head count at the agency has been reduced significantly under Trump, prompting media criticism and scaremongering.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is ready for hurricane season.
Head count at the agency has been reduced significantly under President Donald Trump, prompting media criticism and scaremongering — but Laura Grimm, NOAA’s chief of staff and acting administrator, is confident that the reorganization left the agency in a better position to accomplish its mission: forecasting and analyzing the weather.
“Unfortunately, all people are seeing is cancellation of contracts. ‘We’re defunding X, Y, and Z,’” Grimm explained in a recent wide-ranging interview inside the agency headquarters. Instead of bemoaning canceled research and contracts, she said, people “should be proud” that the administration has been made leaner and more efficient, without sacrificing readiness.
“That’s the part of the story that isn’t ever really told.”
NOAA is accelerating the timeline to technologically transform the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), the forecasting system used by the National Weather Service to transmit meteorological data to NOAA offices nationwide. The idea is to modernize the hardware so that it can transmit real-time data to the cloud, a goal of the agency for the past decade, as part of a broader initiative to make the agency more technologically nimble.
“We’re doing it very fast,” she says. “We’re doing it in 18 months.”
Grimm acknowledges that this AWIPS transformation has also required leadership to reevaluate certain grants and contracts, including some that were on track for auto-renewal, “in order to be able to push that money towards what we actually want, which is moving to the cloud.”
Speaking with National Review, Grimm and Ken Graham, the head of the National Weather Service, maintain that the agency is technologically prepared for what’s expected to be a very busy hurricane season.
“Look, it’s my job to make sure we’re ready, and we’re ready,” Graham says. “I’ve talked to the states, and we’re ready to go.”
Earlier this year, the NWS and NOAA lost hundreds of staffers to layoffs and resignations. Grimm says that the agency has had a capacity issue for years and that the incentivized resignations accelerated the natural attrition of older meteorologists who are rolling off the workforce.
According to the Wall Street Journal, shrinking staff affected some regional offices’ overnight operations and launch schedules for weather balloons, which collect atmospheric data on storms. That presented short term-challenges for the National Weather Service leadership, who relied on reassigning current staff to fill vacancies and is now in rehiring mode.
“Thank God,” Graham told NR, pressed on the NWS rehiring efforts. “We’re on the way to recovery, but in the meantime, I got the staff to be able to get through the hurricane season,” he says. “All the warnings are going out, all those forecasts are going out,” but “there’s a little bit of movement that has to take place” to ensure that the balloons are launching on schedule.
“In the short term, we’re able to move people around and get it done,” Graham said in an interview, acknowledging that “burnout” at the agency makes it difficult to hold onto staff. He looks forward to adding some new faces to the building. “I’m glad we have the opportunity to be able to do that hiring, because we have an important mission to save lives in the weather service. So, I appreciate the administration’s support to be able to do that.”
Pressed on whether staffers should expect more cuts, Grimm says that their focus is ensuring that the right people are leading the agency’s technological mission. “NOAA had a lot of people exit through the voluntary opportunities, and I don’t foresee us really having much more change as far as that,” she said. “Really now, we’re trying to think about: What does everything look like? Who are the right people in the right spots to lead this next effort?”
NOAA Attracts Adventure-Seekers
Ken Graham knew he wanted to be a meteorologist from six years of age. And most of his colleagues are no different.
“Everywhere you look there’s a passionate person doing the job,” Graham said.
That’s particularly true of the agency’s Hurricane Hunter pilots, who fly into the eye of a storm to collect atmospheric data for NOAA’s meteorologists. This skill set is very hands-on, requiring them to fly 100 feet over water for some missions and spiral up to 28,000 feet for others.
Every day brings a new challenge for the pilots, as NR witnessed firsthand during an exclusive tour of their aircrafts. They do flood prediction and water management, and they conduct missions in search of whales, turtles, and dolphins. They study gravity waves from storms and conduct air chemistry missions, whereby they fly around oil fields to track oil companies’ greenhouse gas emissions.
Brand-new NOAA pilots spend about 200 to 220 days a year away from home, traveling, flying, and supporting missions.
“I think in my first two years of being a NOAA pilot, I had spent a night in every single state in the United States — it just happened naturally,” one pilot explained to National Review inside an NOAA aircraft parked on the tarmac of Reagan National Airport earlier this month. “Some of our missions are down at 500 feet in the mountains. Some of our missions are through hurricanes. Some of our missions on the north slip of Alaska and Guam and American Samoa.”
NOAA traditionally doesn’t bring pilots into the P-3 hurricane aircraft community without a few thousand flight hours. Many of the pilots come to NOAA after inner-service transfers from the Navy, Air Force, Army, and Coast Guard. The agency also has a direct aviation program and works with universities to hire through the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps.
“We’re in a cool phase of the acquisition right now where Lockheed’s like, ‘What do you want to call this plane?’ Because we’re modifying it pretty heavily,” one pilot said of Lockheed Martin’s WP-3D Orion.
NOAA also uses another Hurricane Hunter called a Gulfstream IV, a twin-engine jet that releases an instrument called a GPS dropsonde to collect real-time atmospheric data from storms. The nose of the plane is quite prominent, which is how this jet earned its “Gonzo” nickname.
How AI, New Technology Is Revolutionizing NOAA Methods
NOAA leaders are confident that artificial intelligence will soon revolutionize the way the agency analyzes data. Right now, a supercomputer runs a forecast model twice a day. Currently, NOAA is experimenting with AI to help model land-based, space-based, and ocean-based observations to develop weather models every hour.
“That’s what I’m excited about,” Graham says, adding that the administration is currently working on several projects on this front. “That could be a game-changer: improving the forecast constantly instead of just waiting for the next model.”
At the same time, Graham maintains that human presence is important for in-person situational awareness for storm forecasting. In his view, AI is another “tool” in a meteorologist’s arsenal. “It’s that eye to eye contact that we have that’s everything, right?”
Grimm is also confident that AI will help modernize deep-sea exploration video models, which could help change the way researchers analyze marine life and revolutionize the agency’s fishery service stock collection modeling.
Reflecting on her time in graduate school analyzing deep-sea video processing, she’s struck by how hours of human video processing “now can be done in ten minutes” using machine learning.
Forecast-modeling has also drastically improved in recent decades. Key technology has revolutionized the process, including the drones NOAA pilots drop into the eye of the storm to extract crucial data on the path and intensity of hurricanes.
The National Hurricane Center’s new Tropical Cyclone product allows meteorologists to issue watches and warnings on incoming tropical storms and hurricanes based on mere clouds, allowing for much earlier warnings than were previously possible. And for weather forecasters, timing is everything.
“You can give another 24 or 48 hours on a timeline. Think about the things you can do with resources, evacuations and things,” Graham says. “It’s an eternity on a timeline.”