Our apartment felt ominous the morning of August 29, 2005: my roommate was in her bedroom with the door shut, with her television loud enough that I could make out the words “Katrina” and “landfall.”
Still, the two of us were native Floridians, accustomed to the rhythm of hurricane season. In both of our elementary-school classrooms 12 years prior, we’d been joined by Hurricane Andrew evacuees from Homestead, one of Florida’s hardest-hit areas. Our fathers had gone to Homestead to repair roofs in Andrew’s aftermath. We’d been part of dinner-table conversations about “the BIG one.” But honestly, we never fully comprehended the gravity of potential destruction.
Until Hurricane Katrina.
With Katrina, the injustice wrought by people in power collided with the power of the laws of physics.
Systemic racism and redlining put people in harm’s way; head-in-the sand “engineering” hampered nature’s ability to buffer storms; and too many prior evacuations for storms that didn’t hit New Orleans undermined the public response to Katrina’s forecast. One thousand three hundred and ninety-two souls were taken.
The people demanded better: a more resilient New Orleans, a better hurricane forecast, and a restored Mississippi River Delta. Just last week, Louisiana’s governor backslid on a major part of plans to rebuild the coast, by canceling the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.
Now, it appears that the significant progress made in improving hurricane forecasts will also stop, because of presidential actions.
Those of us watching forecasts during this year’s hurricane season need to know what’s happening behind the scenes, because people in power are once again leaving citizens subject to the power of nature with insufficient tools to mitigate the risk.
NOAA sets out to improve hurricane forecasting; Trump administration undermines its own law after years of progress
In 2007, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) launched the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), which set 10-year goals to radically improve the accuracy of hurricane track and intensity forecasts. It met many of its initial goals, including the reduction of hurricane-track errors by more than 50%.
In April 2017, President Donald Trump signed the bipartisan Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act, which recognized the success of the HFIP by authorizing a second phase—the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program—to further improve storm predictions.
But even an accurate severe-weather forecast will only save lives to the extent that people receive, understand, and act upon it. The weather and emergency management community calls this the “last mile” issue.
And so the 2017 Act also required that every one of the nation’s 122 National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices have a designated Warning Coordination Meteorologist (WCM). By law, each Warning Coordination Meteorologist must plan ahead, by keeping up-to-date local lists of who to call in the face of severe weather, including hospitals, schools, or other especially vulnerable or critical facilities. The meteorologist in charge of warnings would also work closely with emergency managers and disaster-response agencies, and may implement trainings with key community partners.
As New Orleanians know, hurricanes arrive relatively slowly, but they can intensify rapidly. Flash floods, tornadoes, and microbursts are similarly fast phenomena with little lead time. Even when working at its very best levels, weather prediction may only be able to give a few hours of lead time for these kinds of events.
In non-meteorological contexts, we prepare for circumstances that arise quickly. We conduct drills for fires, active shooters, and cruise-ship lifeboat evacuations. In the weather community, the best practice is to conduct table-top exercises. Having relationships and specific knowledge of a community is essential to get the forecast to the “last mile.”
In September of 2017, NOAA quite accurately predicted the track of Hurricane Maria, thanks to the HFIP. But the storm intensified rapidly, demonstrating the need for HFIP’s second phase. Maria became one of the most lethal storms in recorded history.
Two years later, as we stared down an extremely powerful Hurricane Dorian, years of scientific refinement were undermined at the stroke of a pen. Only two years earlier, a different pen had signed the legislation launching HFIP’s second phase, supercharging the nation’s ability to effectively predict and protect people and property from severe weather.
DOGE cuts staff at the National Weather Service
Policies instituted by the “Department of Government Efficiency” decimated the already-bare staffing at local Weather Forecast Offices, where for at least 10 years, there had been a concerted effort at recruitment. And the cutbacks go beyond just the numbers: the remaining staff can’t travel or train. These restrictions hamstring preparedness and leave warnings unheard. Other policies may undermine the quality of the forecasts themselves. The Secretary of Commerce must now personally review all contracts over $100,000, an amount that includes the cost to purchase the commercial data that improves our ability to understand hurricanes.
In 2024, NOAA made record-accurate track forecasts. Improvements in hurricane forecasting in the last 20 years have resulted in over $5 billion in savings per major hurricane landfall.
The agency has managed to make these vast improvements in hurricane forecasts even with lower funding levels since Katrina. In 2005 NOAA’s budget was $3.94 billion, the equivalent of $6.49 billion in 2025 dollars. For fiscal year 2025, the Biden-Harris administration recommended $6.1 billion across all missions – not just weather. And NOAA missions are complementary. For instance, understanding more about the ocean has dramatically improved hurricane forecasts.
But the same president who signed into law the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 has now requested a nearly 25% cut to NOAA’s budget. This level of austerity would be a dangerous and fiscally irresponsible gamble at a time when nearly every day brings the incomprehensible toll of severe weather, affecting much of the nation, from North Carolina to New Mexico and every state in between.
This is why, at least so far, there has been bipartisan and bicameral opposition to the deepest National Weather Service cuts proposed by the administration.
Forecasters need to focus alerts to a threshold grounded in science and risk, so that the public heeds severe-weather warnings
I was asked a few months ago why “Sharpiegate” was anything more than silly. You may remember that the president contradicted a weather forecast for Alabama by posting a hand-drawn extension of the “cone of uncertainty.” It is a reasonable question, and Gulf Coasters intuitively know the answer, because they know the importance of precision in forecasting.
Preparation is costly. Schools close. People miss work, harden their homes, find gas, sit in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the evacuation route.
When the “cone of uncertainty” covers the whole state, paralysis displaces preparation.
And when folks act on a forecast that doesn’t materialize, anecdotes and data show that they think twice the next time. They get evacuation fatigue. They may think twice about whether to trust the forecasters’ warnings.
I have done this with a touchy smoke alarm, which I began to ignore, knowing it usually beeps for no reason. We saw this with Hurricane Katrina, after “near misses” earlier in the season. Media reports from earlier this month included signs of “warning fatigue” by elected officials in Kerr County, Texas. Though the National Weather Service issued alerts before the Guadalupe River rose acutely on the morning of July 4th, some local officials seemed unaware of those warnings even the next morning.
It can be a delicate balance. If warnings are limited to those times when risk thresholds are elevated, people are more likely to act. But to defy science and suggest that an unthreatened region faces risk is the meteorological equivalent of crying wolf.
This month alone, gushing rainwater created geysers in the New York subway while other weather systems in other places flooded highways and overflowed riverbanks. Clearly, the weather wolf is at the door.
But with its cutbacks and policy rollbacks, this administration is silencing the watchdog.
Sara Gonzalez-Rothi served all four years in the Biden-Harris White House and for nearly a decade in the United States Senate, helping to craft and negotiate legislation including both the 2017 Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act and the 2012 RESTORE Act, passed in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.