Layoffs last week at NOAA’s Office of Aircraft Operations, home of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters, threaten to reduce the quality of data critical for hurricane monitoring, prediction, and warning. On February 28, NOAA terminated two flight directors and one electronic engineer.
Hurricane Hunters fly into active storms to collect data used for weather forecasts.
One might think that the firing of just three crew members in an organization that employs nearly 100 of them would not be a big deal. But it so happened that two of the probationary employees who had been on the job for less than two years were flight directors, the job I held from 1986 to 1990. This is particularly problematic since every hurricane hunter mission is required to carry a flight director – a meteorologist who is charged with ensuring the safety of the mission from a meteorological perspective.
Ride through the eyewall of Hurricane #Helene aboard @NOAA WP-3D Orion #NOAA42 “Kermit” during our evening mission on Sept. 26, 2024. This mission gathered crucial data of a large hurricane intensifying before landfall. Find NOAA resources on continuing impacts and post storm… pic.twitter.com/qv0QxLzjp2
— NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (@NOAA_HurrHunter) September 27, 2024
In order to keep all three NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft operating 24/7 during a significant hurricane, NOAA has in the past had eight crews, and thus eight flight directors. With the loss of two flight directors, NOAA is down to just six of these key crew members. This will barely be enough to keep the planes in the air for the twice-daily flights that occur during a significant hurricane threat. And as explained in an interview with NBC by Kerri Englert, one of the fired flight directors, NOAA had aimed to have 10 flight director positions filled. But after she and another flight director were terminated, that left just six. Now, she said, if one flight director is sick, there will be fewer hurricane hunter flights. And we shouldn’t be surprised if further staff depletions occur before hurricane season – I know that if I still had my old job as a flight director for NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters, worries about my job security would have me looking hard for new employment.
“Indiscriminately firing skilled workers is bad in private business. Add the threat to public safety caused by haphazard and indiscriminate layoffs, and the government actions are impossible to justify by any rational, performance-based standard,” hurricane expert Bryan Norcross wrote this week.
The value of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters
The Air Force, which maintains a fleet of 10 hurricane hunter aircraft, has not been affected by budget cuts. Thus, the loss of a NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft because of short staffing will not greatly reduce the overall quantity of flights undertaken. However, it will significantly reduce the quality of the data collected, potentially negatively impacting hurricane forecasts.
The NOAA aircraft include two heavy-duty P-3 Orions that penetrate into the eye of a hurricane and one high-altitude Gulfstream IV jet that collects data around the periphery. All of the hurricane hunter aircraft — both Air Force and NOAA — feed data into the computer models used to forecast hurricanes. This includes data from instruments mounted on the aircraft as well as “dropsonde” data from probes launched from the aircraft that fall on parachutes through the storm. But only NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft carry Doppler radars, which capture a detailed 3D picture of the entire storm every few seconds.
Data from these Doppler radars are fed into three of our top hurricane models: the newer HAFS-A and HAFS-B and the older HWRF. The two newer models made the best intensity forecasts of any of the models for two of the most damaging hurricanes of 2024, Milton and Beryl, and also did very well for Helene. In many cases, the HAFS-A and HAFS-B forecasts were far superior to the official intensity forecasts from the National Hurricane Center. Without data from the NOAA Hurricane Hunters, it is dubious that these models would have performed as well — and the National Hurricane Center official forecasts would likely have been less accurate. A 2024 study found that assimilation of the data from the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 2007-2022 into one of the top hurricane intensity models, the HWRF, helped reduce its intensity forecast errors by 45%–50%.
Bumpy ride into Hurricane #Milton on @NOAA WP-3D Orion #NOAA43 “Miss Piggy” to collect data to help improve the forecast and support hurricane research.
Visit for the latest forecasts and advisories
Visit for information that you… pic.twitter.com/ezmXu2Zqta— NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (@NOAA_HurrHunter) October 8, 2024
National Hurricane Center losing two staff members
According to conversations I’ve had with knowledgeable people, the National Hurricane Center, or NHC, did not have any probationary employees fired in last week’s purge. However, NHC is losing one tropical analysis and forecasting branch forecaster and one technology and science branch IT person to the “fork in the road” offer. With a staff of just 76, staffing will be a bit tight at NHC for the immediate future, I was told. It appears that NHC will have a full complement of the hurricane specialists that write the hurricane advisories this year (though NOAA is being threatened with further mass layoffs – see end of article).
The NOAA Hurricane Hunters are key to advancements in hurricane research
The three NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft are world-class flying laboratories that carry research scientists from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division into storms. Research performed by these aircraft has been critical in the huge advancements that have been credited with astonishing increases in forecasting that have generated billions in savings in recent years. As reported in our post last week, The National Hurricane Center set an all-time record for forecast accuracy in 2024, a 2024 study by the non-profit, non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts,” found that recent advancements in hurricane forecasting for 18 continental U.S. landfalling hurricanes from 2005-2020 (including all nine major landfalls and nine of the 20 additional Cat 1 and Cat 2 landfalls) led to a 19% reduction in total hurricane-related costs — an average cost reduction of $5 billion per hurricane. The benefits came either by decreasing deaths and damages or by inspiring confidence in decisions not to spend money on pre-storm adaptation measures.
The average benefit of $5 billion per major hurricane is on par with the entire 2024 NOAA budget of $6.8 billion and far in excess of the cumulative $250 million spent over the period 2009-2019 on hurricane research. And these benefits were likely considerably underestimated, the researchers said, since they only looked at the value of improved wind speed forecasts and did not study improved rainfall and storm surge forecasts.
Significant cuts to hurricane research
Significant cuts to NOAA’s hurricane research efforts have also occurred, though the full scope is unclear. NPR reports that six hurricane researchers were fired at NOAA’s hurricane research lab in Miami, including Andy Hazelton, one of the key developers of NOAA’s top hurricane forecasting models. In an interview with local10.com, which has a copy of his termination letter, Hazelton said, “I got a performance review recently that said I was doing a good job. I won NOAA awards for team member of the year. Our big mission is to protect lives and property. All the weather data that you use, whether it is an app on your phone or what you see on TV, a lot of that comes from the National Weather Service and NOAA — the satellites, the radars, the modeling. When you see the spaghetti lines on TV, that is what I do. I am the brains behind the computer that makes that spaghetti line.”
In an interview with the Washington Post, Rick Spinrad, a former administrator of NOAA, said that NOAA’s Environmental Modeling Center had suffered a 25% staff cut. This group is responsible for the computer forecast models that form the bedrock of U.S. weather forecasting, including hurricane prediction. In an interview with NPR, James Franklin, a retired head of NHC’s Hurricane Forecast Unit, said staffing cuts have gutted the modeling center to the point where he wonders if work there to improve the hurricane models will come to a halt.
