WASHINGTON (AP) — As nasty tornadoes popped up from Kansas to Kentucky, a depleted National Weather Service was in scramble mode.
The agency’s office in Jackson, Kentucky, had started closing at night due to significant budget reductions following directives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Despite this, the weather service extended staff hours on Friday night to manage the severe storms, which tragically claimed the lives of nearly 20 people within the Jackson office’s forecasting zone.
This scenario may repeat as the U.S. anticipates more tornadoes in the current year than in 2024, previously the second-highest year for tornadoes on record. Forecasters warned of at least a 10% chance of tornadoes on Tuesday, threatening 10.6 million residents across parts of Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Weather service veterans are worried about the agency’s ability to maintain service levels amid these budget cuts.
Rich Thompson, lead operations forecaster at the NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, confirmed that the task is being accomplished but admitted that staffing reductions have “made it harder on us.”
“It has made it hard on the local offices just to make sure that we have all of our important duties covered. But, I mean, most of the people take those important duties seriously, so we’re going to do what it takes to cover it,” Thompson said. “I hope we’re not in the same staffing situation long term. … It would be hard to sustain this for months or years.”
NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei said the Jackson office “remained fully staffed through the duration of the event using surge staffing” and had support from neighboring offices.
A leaner weather service is seeing more extreme weather
The Storm Prediction Center had tallied 883 local tornado reports this year as of Monday, which was 35% higher than average for this time of year.
Many former weather service employees, especially those fired by the Trump administration, remain connected to the agency’s inner workings. They describe an agency that’s somehow getting forecasts and warnings out in time, but is also near the breaking point.
“They’ll continue to answer the bell as long as they can, but you can only ask people to work 80 hours or 120 hours a week, you know for so long,” said Elbert “Joe” Friday, a former weather service director. “They may be so bleary-eyed, they can’t identify what’s going on on the radar.”
Tom DiLiberto, a weather service meteorologist and spokesman who was fired in earlier rounds of the job cuts, said the situation is like a boat with leaks “and you have a certain amount of pieces of duct tape and you keep moving duct tape to different holes. At some point, you can’t.”
As of March, some of the weather service offices issuing tornado warnings Friday and Sunday were above the 20% vacancy levels that outside experts have said is a critical threshold. Those include Jackson, with a 25% vacancy rate, Louisville, Kentucky, with a 29% vacancy rate, and Wichita, Kansas, with a 32% vacancy rate, according to data compiled by weather service employees and obtained by the AP.
Technologies used to predict tornadoes have significantly improved, but radar can’t replace a well-rested staff that has to figure out how nasty or long-lasting storms will be and how to get information to the public, said Karen Kosiba, managing director of the Flexible Array of Mesonets and Radars (FARM) facility, a network of weather equipment used for research.
“There really are not enough people to handle everything,” said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Howard Bluestein, who chased six tornadoes Sunday. “If the station is understaffed, that could affect the quality of forecasts.”
Cuts hit in different ways
Former weather service Director Louis Uccellini said budget cuts have drastically reduced the number of weather balloon launches, which provide critical information for forecasts. And weather service workers aren’t being allowed to travel to help train local disaster officials for what to do when they get dangerous weather warnings, he said.
Though the number of tornadoes is nearly at a record pace, Thompson and other experts said the tornado outbreak of the last few days is mostly normal for this time of year.
For tornadoes to form, the atmosphere needs a collision of warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and storm systems chugging through via the jet stream, the river of air that brings weather fronts from west to east, said Thompson, Bluestein and Harold Brooks of the weather service’s National Severe Storm Laboratory.
“The moisture that we’re getting from the Gulf of Mexico is a lot more than we used to get,” said Bluestein. “That makes the likelihood that we’re getting a stronger storm higher and that’s pretty unusual.”
Temperatures in the Gulf are a couple of degrees warmer than usual for this time of year, according to the weather service.
The connection between climate change and tornadoes is not as well understood as the links between other types of extreme weather such as heavy rainfall and heat waves, experts say.
“Under the climate change scenario, we’re kind of supercharging the atmosphere on some days and then actually reducing the favorability on others,” said Ohio State University atmospheric sciences professor Jana Houser.
Scientists are also seeing more tornadoes in January, February, March and other times when it used to be too cold for twisters to form, especially in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee, she said.
More people are also living in harm’s way, Brooks said. That’s why Uccellini and others see increasing risks to people and property.
“When you have this kind of threat and you’re understaffed at some point, something’s going to slip through the cracks,” Uccellini said. “I can’t tell you when it’s going to happen.”
