Retired government meteorologist and hurricane hunter Frank Marks knew the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would be in trouble after the Trump Administration made massive funding and personnel cuts earlier this year. So he volunteered his services and told the agency to call him if they ever needed an extra hand.
They did.
When a storm mission launched in August for Hurricane Erin, NOAA reached out and Marks put his flight suit back on.
“The staff’s down by a third, and the number of people with experience in going on the missions is pretty slim,” said Marks, a former director of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Center with over four decades of experience. “So I offered, I said, ‘Listen, you know, if I’m around, I’m willing to go’.”
Marks joining the mission was a sign of the strains that the federal government’s weather forecasting agencies are operating under.
Earlier this year, before hurricane season began June 1, Florida weather experts made dire predictions about the impact of the funding reductions. Now, as the end of hurricane season on Nov. 30 approaches, they have had over four months to assess the toll of the cuts to see whether their worries about the country’s degraded ability to identify and track hurricanes were borne out.
“If we give up our best chances for new observations, improved models, and better products and services, I fear we’ll look back 20 years from now and say progress stopped here,” Marks said.
NOAA didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Weather experts said they feared that if forecasts become less accurate, the public will lose faith in them — and the result will be that residents will be less likely to heed hurricane warnings and evacuate when their lives may be in danger.
“Evacuations are expensive,” said John Morales, a veteran meteorologist and Hurricane Specialist for South Florida’s NBC 6 news. “If they evacuate unnecessarily, that’s gas, food, and lost wages. And next time, they may not evacuate at all.”
No hurricanes in Florida — so far
To date, Florida has been fortunate. There have been fewer named storms than NOAA predicted ahead of the season and no hurricanes have made landfall in the state so far.
Monica Medina, a former principal deputy undersecretary at NOAA and former assistant secretary of state who served in several Democratic administrations, believes that the essential safety net is now severely compromised.
“The forecasts are, I believe, at risk now and eventually will become much less accurate if we continue to not take in all the data and not do the critical science,” Medina said. “What you see is giant holes in various different offices. Key people like the meteorologist in charge. Those positions are empty.”
She added, “We will experience backsliding to where we were decades ago…every minute in which you have a more accurate forecast of a severe weather event, every minute matters.”
Local experts agree that the problem translates directly to public risk. Morales offered a blunt assessment months into the hurricane season:
“The reality is you are less safe in 2025 than you were in 2024, and it’s because of these budget cuts.”
NOAA oversees all federal weather science, while the National Weather Service (NWS) is the primary branch responsible for delivering daily forecasts and warnings to the public. Morales, who has worked in both government and broadcast meteorology for over three decades, warned that federal cuts to both agencies are reducing accuracy of hurricane forecasts, which depend partly on essential functions such as daily weather balloon releases, emergency manager training, and storm data collection.
Morales, citing a conversation he had with Robert Garcia, the warning coordination meteorologist for the NWS in Miami, said national staffing shortage in the wake of the budget cuts is hitting home in South Florida.
“In Miami’s National Weather Service office, they’re operating with only 50% of their normal staffing,” Morales said. “The overnight shift is a one-man band.”
He continued, “Instead of launching the (weather) balloon at, you know, I believe it’s at 7 a.m., we’re waiting until 1 p.m. to release it. That’s because you have one person on shift and you can’t afford to have that person exit the office, go outside, release this balloon, and do all of that.”
In an interview, Garcia did not dispute their mid-September conversation, but said the NWS is currently working on several different hiring processes.
“Right now, we do have enough staffing to meet our missions,” Garcia said. “With that being said, things are rapidly starting to change because hiring processes are now underway, so hopefully in the near future there will be increased staffing.”
James Franklin, 67, is a South Florida resident and former NOAA forecaster and branch chief at the National Hurricane Center (NHC) who now works part-time as a contractor assisting that agency with research projects.
Forecasting holds up for now
Holding up for nowFranklin said forecasting in the region is holding up for now, but he remains concerned about the future.
“This is going to affect public safety, plain and simple,” Franklin said. “Forecasts are going to stop getting better…Not because we can’t do it, but because we’re choosing to stop making them better.”
Franklin noted that the NOAA hurricane hunters are struggling with staffing gaps and said he remains particularly concerned about emergency response. During the hurricane off-season, NHC meteorologists typically conduct training for local officials, including how to interpret hurricane forecasts. But due to budget and travel restrictions, many of those sessions are being canceled, Franklin mentioned.
The NHC did not respond to requests for comment.
Franklin warned that future cuts could be catastrophic.
“If the cooperative institutes (academic and non-profit research bodies) and the NOAA labs shut down, then there are a whole bunch of things that are going to happen starting next year that I think are really, really serious,” Franklin said. “All the people who fly in the NOAA hurricane hunters would stop doing their research and stop doing things like the Doppler radar missions, and that will directly affect the accuracy of our hurricane models. They’ll be degraded.”
Morales, of NBC 6, added, “You need to better prepare for these weather extremes than in the past, because there’s a chance they’re not going to be as well forecasted as they used to be.”
The story was originally published by Caplin News, a publication of FIU's Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media, as part of an editorial content partnership with the WLRN newsroom.
