NOAA Budget Cuts Could Significantly Impact Hurricane Season

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A budget proposal for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) paints a potentially harrowing picture with less than two months before the start of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.

If the proposed budget cuts to NOAA are enacted as is, it would have wide-ranging impacts on climate research, significantly decrease the accuracy of hurricane forecasting, end climate monitoring for farmers reliant on the service and ultimately leave coastal communities, like the entire state of Florida, to fend for themselves during hurricane season.

NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) would get hit particularly hard. The proposed budget would cut its funding by about 75% and close all of its weather and climate research labs.

The programs that retained funding, like research into tornado warnings, would be moved to other parts of the organizations, like the National Weather Service, whose budget would go untouched.

In AccuWeather's severe weather forecast published in March, it predicted between 1,300-1,450 tornadoes. By early April, NOAA's Storm Prediction Center (SPC) had already received 473 preliminary tornado reports, which is 1.8 times higher than both the 16-year average of 266 and last year's total of 264 for the same time period. That number is roughly 34% of the total number of tornadoes AccuWeather originally predicted.

Cuts to NOAA's budget would heavily impact our ability to predict storm forecasts with the degree of accuracy we do now, especially hurricanes.

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