Summary
NOAA is facing turmoil as over 1,000 staff have been fired or resigned under Trump’s push to downsize the federal workforce, with 1,000 more cuts expected.
Elon Musk’s DOGE has disrupted weather operations, including halting weather balloon launches and briefly firing hurricane tracking staff.
A faulty, unsecured email server flooded employees with spam, symbolizing the chaos.
Critics warn the cuts threaten public safety, climate research, and marine oversight. Protests have emerged as staff face uncertainty and deteriorating agency operations.
FYI: WeatherUnderground is basically crowdsourced using off-the-shelf weather stations you can put in your backyard, on top of public data from NASA, NOAA, ECAD, ESA, etc. The only downside is there aren’t many civilians in the middle of the ocean, so hurricane tracking will be lacking if NASA and NOAA do get neutered.
For anyone wanting to contribute, here’s a few popular stations:
AcuRite Pro Weather Station
Ambient Weather WS-2902
Not discounting that (it’s a cool project), but NOAA/NWS are the ones that issue the EAS severe weather alerts (when your phone/TV/radio goes all REEET REEEEET REEEET letting you know shit’s getting real). Some severe weather you can plan for based on forecast (snow storms, some thunderstorms), others you need constant eyes on and as much warning as possible (tornadoes).
And tornado season is coming up, so…yeah, buckle up, Midwest.
Edit: Also, I feel your username lol.
That helps slightly but in the absence of radar, balloons, and satellite telemetry, it doesn’t help accuracy of forecast beyond, “it might rain here in a few hours, it might not.” Not much different in functional usefulness than looking at the trees to see if it’s going to rain.
I have a watch with a barometric pressure sensor, it will alert me to potential maybe coming storms, but only potential maybe, not what direction, what intensity, what hail potential, what wind shear. All it knows is the air pressure is changing pretty fast. It is right maybe one in ten times. (My location tends to have very rapid weather changes, in general, however.)
And outside of that, ground stations don’t really help to keep air traffic safely in the skies at all, lacking jet stream telemetry, which is calculated and estimated on a daily basis to figure out which sky highways flights should use. Not just passengers either, most commercial passenger airliners have a portion of their cargo hold sold to shipping (and make more money on that than the seats). USPS, other shipping companies all ship in cargo holds. Water transport would be affected as well of course, as well as rail and truck to a lesser degree due to floods/landslides/blizzards or random sideways Texas sandstorms blowing semi trucks over.
With flights, this means fuel estimates will be off, tailwind or headwind is stronger or weaker than predicted, you’re landing at an alternate airport. This means more random turbulence and/or injuries mid-flight. More grounded flights, more flight delays. More potential for collision. Especially with neutered ATC in concert.
It is all interconnected, and all being arbitrarily destroyed without any thought into why it all exists.