Trump’s cuts could affect Australia’s capacity to predict storms

Somewhere around February 15, Tropical Cyclone Alfred stirred to life in the waters of the Coral Sea. Over the days that followed, it grew and gathered its strength in the sea’s cyclone nursery, eventually forming in to a monster fed by record warm sea surface temperatures beneath.

How do we know all this? The US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was watching.

Australian Defence Force personnel clear a Queensland road after ex-tropical cyclone Alfred.Credit:

The NOAA bills itself as the US’s “environmental intelligence agency”. It records and forecasts climate change; it maps the ocean floor; it sends weather balloons into the atmosphere; and its scientists and meteorologists predict deadly tsunamis, storms and cyclones.

Australian climate scientists, including leading expert Professor David Karoly, this week analysed Coral Sea surface temperatures collected by the NOAA and found the record sea surface temperatures (0.89 degrees above the 1961-90 average) had helped ex-tropical cyclone Alfred form.

The cyclone saddled taxpayers with an estimated $1.2 billion bill. And as oceans absorb ever more carbon pollution – in the form of heat energy – the ferocity of cyclones such as Alfred will increase.

“Today, we are putting more than 10 zeta joules of extra heat energy into the ocean each year,” Karoly said. “That’s the equivalent energy of five Hiroshima bomb explosions every second.”

NOAA scientists in 2016 released this image of an octopus thought to be a previously unknown species, discovered during a search of the Pacific Ocean floor near the Hawaiian islands.Credit: AP

But our ability to predict monster storms like Alfred is under a cloud. The NOAA is in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has laid off hundreds of staff at the agency. It plans to sack more.

Project 2025, the conservative blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation think tank that lines up with many Trump administration moves so far, had called for the NOAA to be dismantled. Russ Vought, one of the document’s architects, is the White House’s budget director.

Layoffs have included marine habitat and satellite specialists in the Washington region, marine sanctuary analysts in Maine, and information technology and human resources staff in Virginia and Rhode Island, posts from fired workers on LinkedIn show. Hundreds of scientists working on the models and data that feed weather forecasts had their jobs terminated.

Scientists in Australia now fear that decades of scientific progress could be placed at risk, given weather and climate observations recorded by the NOAA are fed into climate and weather forecasts around the world.

Karoly said more significant cuts to the NOAA could hamper international efforts to map climate change.

Climate scientists are working on the seventh Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. Some NOAA staff who have lost their jobs were technical staff with an IPCC working group.

“That technical support unit is critical to the next IPCC assessment process,” Karoly said. It would now fall to another country to try to lead that work.

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society president Dr Martin Singh said weather monitoring and predictive systems were internationally interconnected.

“They are quite interconnected because you have to observe the whole world,” he said. “Everybody needs observations of everywhere.”

This satellite image provided by CSU/CIRA and NOAA, taken on February 25, shows three cyclones, (from left) Alfred, Seru and Rae, east of Australia in the South Pacific.Credit: nna\advidler

As with so many other aspects of policy shifts emanating from US President Donald Trump’s White House, there is no clear picture about the size or scale of the cuts.

Staff and contractors told The Guardian that a third of NOAA’s 12,000 staff could lose their jobs. The New York Times has reported 1300 staff had been laid off since February 27 and there are plans to cut 1000 more jobs. Meanwhile, NBC News reported that 600 staff had been laid off, but some had been subsequently reinstated.

As conflicting news trickles out of the US, climate scientists around the world are wondering how the staffing cuts will limit the NOAA’s capacity to collect data, and its capacity to predict natural disasters and to map climate change.

An NOAA spokeswoman on Thursday announced the agency would reduce its weather balloon services at a number of locations due to staffing constraints.

Karoly said: “If all of the NOAA services were cut back, there would be a major reduction in those sorts of capabilities because those NOAA data sets have been what the Bureau [of Meteorology] has been using to describe the impact [of extreme weather].

“The Bureau of Meteorology feeds those sea surface temperatures into their numerical weather forecast models [for] Australia and globally … forecasting events like Tropical Cyclone Alfred and other tropical cyclones around Australia.”

In a statement, a weather bureau spokesman said the agency worked closely with international partners.

“The Bureau of Meteorology collaborates with and acquires weather and related data from 193 countries and territories that are members of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). This includes the US,” he said.

“The bureau is in close daily contact with its counterparts in the US meteorological agency. No changes in specific policy direction or advice have been received from the bureau’s partner agencies in the US.”

Gregh Mullins, a Climate Council member and former fire commissioner, said data such as that collected by the NOAA was more crucial than ever as the effects of climate change consolidated.

“We rely more now on that sort of data than we ever did,” he said.

“Years ago, it was a 10-year cycle, and you could play it by ear that you’d probably get a bad fire season this year … you can’t play it by ear now. You have to be prepared because the bad seasons are so much worse than they used to be.”

The WMO this week reported that 2024 was the hottest year on record, at 1.55 degrees hotter than pre-industrial average temperatures, and with the highest concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in 800,000 years.

Climate Council member and economist Nicki Hutley said the financial costs of climate change were growing.

“The Treasury has estimated a $1.2 billion hit on the budget and a threat to inflation [from Alfred]. A decade of climate inaction is costing all of us dearly, with massive clean-up bills and over 63,000 insurance claims currently lodged in the wake of tropical cyclone Alfred.”

with Reuters

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