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Congress urged to ignore proposed cuts to weather system
A little-known NOAA monitoring system warns about hurricanes, tornadoes and heat waves. Biden wants to cut its budget in 2024.
CLIMATEWIRE | A federal disaster alert program that helps communities prepare for hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe weather faces a budget cut that is alarming Congress as climatologists urge more money for the system.
President Joe Biden has proposed cutting a vital but little-known NOAA alert program at the same time that the administration is spending more than $300 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act to fight climate change through tax incentives and subsidies.
Although the detection system — called the National Mesonet Program — does not affect carbon emissions, it helps with climate impacts by gathering weather data crucial to predicting extreme weather and issuing alerts.
The program receives information from 7,500 private and public weather stations nationwide to give NOAA comprehensive, real-time data about developing storms, tornadoes and heat waves.
NOAA uses the information to warn about approaching severe weather, experts told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee at a hearing Tuesday.
But the program’s current funding “pales in comparison” to the money that’s needed to run a “fully functioning system,” North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello told lawmakers.
“There's not a week that goes by that we don't get a call in our office from a farmer who wants an ECONet station of their own. And we just can't promise it with the amount of funding that we get right now,” Dello said. “Despite the overwhelming, demonstrated need for more data, there are serious limitations.”
Biden is seeking to cut $4.7 million from the National Mesonet Program, an amount that the White House told E&E News would “bring the program in line with its historical funding level and redirect the savings to fund other NOAA priorities.”
Biden’s overall budget includes $24 billion for programs that aim to make communities resilient to the worse impacts of climate change.
The $4.7 million cut would reduce the number of tracking stations to 7,312 from 7,500, according to NOAA’s fiscal 2024 budget estimate.
“Even with this reduction, NOAA would provide $20 million to maintain the highest-quality Mesonet observation platforms, with a goal of maintaining over 7,000 observation platforms,” the White House said.
Experts at the hearing Tuesday said more stations are needed because the accuracy of disaster alerts depends on the breadth of the system’s coverage and the number of data-gathering centers, the experts said.
Oklahoma has a robust network of weather stations that help state authorities spot tornadoes in advance. But Oklahomans who live near other states get little warning about tornadoes coming from Texas, Arkansas or Kansas, all of which lack a thorough network of observation stations, said Gary McManus, a climatologist at Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
“Weather, especially severe weather, knows no geopolitical boundaries,” McManus told lawmakers.
Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), the Science Committee's chair, expressed “personal disappointment” at the hearing over the proposed budget cut.
Tuesday’s hearing was one of several focused on improving weather data as lawmakers look to reauthorize the Weather Act of 2017, which helped fund the disaster-detection and data-gathering programs. Both Democratic and Republican committee members support efforts to improve weather forecasting.
Reporter Mia McCarthy contributed.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
