Cuts to the U.S. agency responsible for weather forecasting and climate science have left scientists on this side of the border concerned about the reliability of data Canada needs to predict dangerous events, conduct accurate flood forecasts and understand broader changes to the climate.
In late February, President Donald Trump’s administration cut more than 1,000 jobs in two rounds — one of 500 and one of 800 — at the National Weather Service and its parent organization NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a former NOAA chief scientist told The Associated Press. That’s about 10 per cent of NOAA’s workforce.
Danny Blair, a climatologist who is co-director of the Prairie Climate Institute and a geography professor at the University of Winnipeg, called the cuts “astonishing and discouraging.”
While the loss of capacity to predict the likes of blizzards, tornadoes, thunderstorms and tsunamis “will almost certainly result in more people being put in harm’s way” in the U.S., Canada will also be affected, he said.
“The production and dissemination of accurate and timely forecasts requires an army of skilled and experienced personnel, as does the data collection and research that is behind the development and improvement of these forecasts,” said Blair.
Blair said with climate change making weather even more dangerous, the U.S. should be expanding, not reducing, its complement of weather forecasters and climate scientists. Much of the world relies on the U.S. weather and climate science, he noted.
“To understand what is happening to the Prairie climate, one cannot just look at data collected on one side of the border,” Blair said.
Flood forecasters count on U.S. data
Manitoba flood forecasters also rely heavily on data collected by the U.S. National Weather Service, as more than 85 per cent of the Red River basin lies south of the U.S. border, said Jay Doering, professor emeritus in civil engineering at the University of Manitoba.
Manitoba’s Hydrologic Forecast Centre requires U.S. data to understand soil moisture, snowpack and other factors that determine the seasonal flood risk for Winnipeg and the rest of the Red River Valley, he said.
“That data tends to come from two sources: the National Climate Data Centre and the National Weather Service, which both fall under the umbrella of NOAA,” said Doering.
“A lot of this data is collected from local instrumentation, and the U.S. has far more satellites in orbit than we do monitoring things related to atmospheric conditions.”
In February, the Trump administration ordered NOAA scientists to seek prior approval before communicating with their Canadian counterparts. This marked a change to the close collaboration between scientists on both sides of the border.
Historically, meteorologists at the National Weather Service office in Grand Forks, N.D., have worked with Environment and Climate Change Canada on blizzard, tornado and thunderstorm warnings, said Jared Marquis, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks.
“Weather doesn’t understand boundaries. Weather crosses boundaries all the time,” Marquis said.
The National Weather Service office in Grand Forks, he said, was so understaffed before a Trump administration hiring freeze took effect in January that meteorologists as far away as Kansas were posting warnings and forecasts for eastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota.
The Grand Forks office faces the loss of one more staff member who is currently on probation, said Marquis, who works closely with the National Weather Service.
“As you start decreasing the number of staff or increasing the stress on these staff while they still have the same number of tasks to do, at some point something’s going to have to break. Hopefully it’s something that’s not mission critical, something that’s not going to affect lives,” he said.
There now are more questions than answers about the future of data gathering and analysis by the National Weather Service, Marquis said.
“There is an upper-air site that has ceased indefinitely in northwestern Alaska. These sites are important because they launch weather balloons to get information about what’s happening with our upper-level weather,” Marquis said.
“We have news coming out about potential lease terminations for things like the Environmental Modeling Center [in Maryland], where the U.S. does most of its weather models. It’s going to take a long time to move any of that equipment and expertise to any other place.”
The U.S. National Weather Service declined to comment on the cuts, citing “long-standing practice” around “internal personnel and management matters.”
The service continues “to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission,” Maryland-based public affairs officer Susan Buchanan said in a statement.
