Are President Trump's cuts to the National Weather Service having a negative impact on forecasting? Former NWS director Joe Friday thinks so.
On Facebook, Friday attributed a "significant loss of accuracy" in the weather's service's modeling to staff reductions and fewer weather balloon launches.
Louisiana's former state climatologist says Friday's claims have merit.
"The models are only as good as the data we input into them," LSU Health climatologist Barry Keim said. "Many of these weather service offices are so understaffed, they have had to give up doing their balloon launches and gathering all this data to get a vertical profile of the atmosphere, and as a result, apparently we're seeing a reduction in the accuracy of the forecast as a result of the lack of input data into the models. The models are just as good as they've ever been, but we just don't have the data to feed into the models to produce accurate results."
Keim says a perfect storm of early retirements and hiring freezes have decimated weather service offices and reduced the quality of forecasts.
"Some weather service offices have been decimated," Keim said. "These are the places where the balloons are launched--the weather balloons that gather information through the vertical structure of the atmosphere.
"The accuracy is clearly going to do down under those circumstances," Keim added.
