Mark Gongloff: Your weather app could soon develop blind spots

We live in an era when people will invest hard-earned dollars in a stock simply because an anonymous Redditor with a handle like “looksmaxxingtrader” posts “We need to save Wendy’s” or some such. But when it comes to the weather, most of us still demand more information before committing to an outfit, an outing or, more important, preparing for a natural disaster.

So it is somewhat alarming to learn that the U.S. weather-forecasting system, long the envy of the world, is gathering notably less information than it once did, thanks to the Trump administration’s budget and staffing cuts. Meteorology is not in r/wallstreetbets territory; nobody has yet been able to measure a related decline in forecast quality. But meteorologists warn the risk is rising that we will miss extreme turns in weather.

That could cost all of us a lot in unnecessary deaths, property losses and economic disruption. And, of course, that pain will be felt most quickly and broadly in a home-insurance market that is already in crisis.

“Insurance is fundamentally a prediction business,” Anthony Lopez, the chief executive officer of the Miami-based Your Insurance Attorney, told me. “The less confidence insurers have in predicting the weather or events, the more expensive insurance is going to become. That uncertainty gets priced into your policy.”

Two recent news reports, one from Gizmodo and another from Politico, said that meteorologists and emergency managers are alarmed that the National Weather Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is no longer launching weather balloons as frequently as it once did. Because of staffing shortages, several NWS stations in a vast swath of the middle of the country, from the Great Plains to the Northwest and Midwest, are often launching only once a day, skipping mornings.

These balloons give forecasters a sort of MRI of the entire atmosphere, from the ground to the top of the troposphere. Losing their morning snapshot can make forecasting later weather more difficult. The West is also a particularly bad part of the country for blind spots because weather systems tend to travel from west to east. Some observers blamed a lack of balloon launches for the failure of NWS to predict tornadoes that hit Kansas in April.

The NOAA denied its launch schedule had caused it to miss any tornadoes and said twisters are notoriously fast-developing and hard to predict. No meteorologist has yet found any fingerprint of budget cuts in any forecast for Kansas or elsewhere.

Still, these balloon observations are particularly important for spotting turns in severe weather, meteorologists warn. The fewer we have, the greater the risk a severe storm takes people by surprise, causing unnecessary death and damage.

“The possibility of a miss is out there,” Andrew Markowitz, a meteorologist with the energy industry and a hefty TikTok following, told me. “We might not notice model performance getting worse. But this does increase the possibility of a miss, and a preventable one at that.”

Kevin Knipp, the CEO of Midland, an emergency weather radio and communications company based in Missouri, told me three types of weather are “especially sensitive to reduced capacity” in data collection: rapidly intensifying hurricanes, tornado outbreaks and localized flash flooding. These, of course, are some of the biggest sources of the rise in billion-dollar weather disasters coinciding with the recent 62% jump in home-insurance costs across the country.

A lack of real-time data makes it harder to pinpoint when and where these disasters will be most severe, Knipp pointed out. To correct for this, emergency managers might overreact and, say, evacuate three counties instead of one. This could lead to “alarm fatigue,” when people become desensitized to warnings. Accurate forecasts, on the other hand, save lives and help first responders and cleanup crews get to disaster sites quickly, cutting down on the insurance losses that pile up when damaged properties sit exposed to the elements for days or weeks.

Even if NWS forecasting hasn’t noticeably suffered yet, today’s squeeze will do long-term harm, former broadcaster Crystal Egger, who is now president, meteorologist and co-founder of the risk-assessment firm Monarch Weather and Climate Intelligence, pointed out. Personnel and data-collection shortages at the NWS will make it harder to keep advancing weather science and building new and better models.

Already, some government meteorologists are getting burned out and discouraged and leaving the field. Last year’s layoffs included experienced hands, weakening NWS’ institutional knowledge. Meanwhile, low staffing is also making critical websites fail and depriving all data users of vital information.

And forget about private companies replicating what NWS had built any time soon. America’s world-leading weather-forecasting system was built over decades, with tax dollars that have already been spent.

“That’s the real loss: all that knowledge. That can’t be replicated by private enterprise,” Char Miller, director of environmental analysis at Pomona College, told me. “This is a slow catastrophe in the making.”

Those relatively modest investments have already saved Americans billions of dollars in damage. NWS’ economic benefit is $100 billion, according to the American Meteorological Society, or about 10 times its cost. Improved hurricane forecasting alone shaved 23% from hurricane costs between 2007 and 2022, or $2 billion per hurricane, according to a study Cornell University researchers published in April.

President Donald Trump’s NWS cuts reverse that math, saving the government very little while guaranteeing ever-higher costs for the rest of us, from still-higher insurance premiums to unexpected catastrophes. They freeze or turn back the clock on forecasting advances, even as the climate grows more chaotic and dangerous. All that’s gained is more uncertainty, of which we already have a glut.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for Fortune.com, the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal.