2026 GOP Budget Would Close NOAA Hurricane Research Center, Along w. More Than A Dozen Research/Forecast Sites Across US [View all]

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And a stupendously crippling cut to our capability to make better hurricane forecasts may be coming if the administration’s 2026 NOAA budget proposal is adopted. As reported by Michael Lowry on July 1: “NOAA posted details of its 2026 budget request to Congress, which closes more than a dozen world-class weather and climate facilities across the U.S., including Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and its Hurricane Research Division, institutions responsible for most of the advancements in hurricane forecasting and science over the past 50 years.”

If this budget is enacted, it would be a crippling blow to hurricane research, likely halting or even reversing the significant progress that has been made in hurricane forecasts in recent years. Members of Congress have expressed that they do not support such a massive cut to NOAA, but it remains to be seen if this desire will be enshrined in law.

NHC has made significant progress in recent years forecasting rapid intensification (Fig. 2). And a 2024 study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts,” found that recent advancements in hurricane forecasting have a huge value: an average cost reduction of $5 billion per major landfalling hurricane over the period 2005-2020. The benefits came either by decreasing deaths and damages or by inspiring confidence in decisions not to spend money on pre-storm adaptation. But given the multiple losses in forecasting capability that have occurred this year, this progress may halt or even reverse beginning in 2025.

Fortunately, for Hurricane Helene last year, NHC forecasters had the luxury of having a full suite of microwave imagery data from polar-orbiting satellites to use for their forecasts. Microwave instruments are critical for making accurate rapid intensification forecasts, since the sensors can “see” through obscuring cloud cover to make an MRI-like 3D scan of the internal structure of a hurricane in ways that conventional visible and infrared satellite imagery cannot. And in locations where the Hurricane Hunters do not fly – all of the Southern Hemisphere, the northwestern Pacific, and usually the Eastern Pacific – microwave data is often essential to making accurate intensity forecasts (see this explainer by Michael Lowry).

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https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/08/climate-change-brings-more-rapidly-intensifying-hurricanes-noaa-cuts-makes-forecasting-them-harder/