More cuts coming to the National Weather Service

At 4 p.m. on Wednesday, a six-foot-wide balloon filled with hydrogen lifted off at the tiny Quillayute Airport, between soggy Forks, Washington, and the western edge of the Olympic Peninsula.

The balloon release was triggered remotely by the National Weather Service office in Seattle.

Before popping more than 100,000 feet high in the upper atmosphere, the weather balloon gathered and relayed data on the severe thunderstorms then building over Western Washington—a rarity in the region’s temperate maritime climate.

With that real-time data, forecasters could predict the evening storms would be less dangerous near the population centers of Puget Sound than on the Olympic Peninsula.

Weather balloon flights—and the forecasts they inform—would become less frequent nationwide under a plan revealed internally on Thursday.

The balloons, currently launched every 12 hours from locations around the world, would only go aloft once a day from any location that loses 15% of its staff, according to National Weather Service plans reviewed by KUOW.

Offices that lose more than 35% of their staff, due to firings, resignations, or retirements, would no longer launch weather balloons and would only update forecasts once a day.

“On a day like last Wednesday, if you just had one forecast, I don't think that would have cut it, right?” said Seattle Weather Blog founder Justin Shaw. “Because you're talking about damaging hail and all these kind of things.”

The Trump administration aims to cut 20% of all staff at the weather service, employees were told at an all-hands meeting Thursday, according to one employee who requested anonymity to avoid retribution.

Jobs are to be cut by April 18, though where the cuts would be made remains unclear.

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Currently, 96 National Weather Service probationary employees nationwide are on administrative leave after being fired then reinstated under a court order.

USA Today reports that staff shortages have already forced balloon launches from at least 11 locations to be curtailed. The Weather Service launches balloons from 100 sites throughout the United States and the Caribbean.

The Department of Commerce, which includes the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, of which the National Weather Service is one branch, has been offering employees up to $25,000 in severance pay to retire early or quit by April 17.

“Especially if we're talking about getting people who've been there a long time to retire, I think anybody who's been in this region knows that this is a region filled with microclimates, and there's a lot of institutional knowledge,” Shaw said.

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Washington state Climatologist Guillaume Mauger said, whether it’s hail, heat, or floods, emergency managers need frequent, up-to-date forecasts when extreme weather hits.

“It could be really bad in a lot of situations to not have better information about what we can expect,” he said. “You need those updates really to know how to plan.”

Mauger said he was concerned about the potential interruption of weather balloon flights and other weather observations that contribute to monitoring the earth’s rapidly changing climate.

“If you have a break in the record, it's harder to understand how things have changed over time,” Mauger said.

The cutbacks at the weather service are part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to rapidly shrink the federal government.

NOAA spokespeople have been declining reporters’ requests for information about the institutional turmoil with a boilerplate statement, “Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s right-wing blueprint for the Trump Administration to "take down the Deep State," calls for breaking up and downsizing NOAA, including commercializing forecasts by the National Weather Service.

“We rely on the weather service for the vast majority of weather forecasts that we get out there,” Mauger said. “Even from other companies, it’s repackaged from the Weather Service.”

KQED reports that, despite already being short-staffed, National Weather Service meteorologists in Seattle are helping the lone National Weather Service meteorologist in a Fremont, California, office that provides real-time weather updates seven days a week to the San Francisco Bay area’s three major airports. Two vacant positions, a retirement, and the Trump administration’s hiring freeze on non-national-security positions have left the Fremont office more severely understaffed than most.