{"id":54331,"date":"2025-03-02T18:04:30","date_gmt":"2025-03-02T23:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/?p=54331"},"modified":"2025-03-02T18:04:49","modified_gmt":"2025-03-02T23:04:49","slug":"noaa-cuts-impact-meteorologists-in-florida-who-track-hurricanes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/2025\/03\/02\/noaa-cuts-impact-meteorologists-in-florida-who-track-hurricanes\/","title":{"rendered":"NOAA cuts impact meteorologists in Florida who track hurricanes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This hurricane season, there could be fewer meteorologists collecting data and designing models due to staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to The Hill, NOAA has begun firings that could impact between
560 and 1,830 probationary workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think when people hear \u2018probationary\u2019 they think someone that\u2019s brand new. This is really people that have, a lot of us have a lot of experience with NOAA for years and years,\u201d said Andy Hazelton, a physical scientist who worked at the Environmental Modeling Center in Miami until he was abruptly fired on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hazelton, who earned a PhD in meteorology, said working for NOAA was a dream job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said he worked with NOAA for years as a contractor and university employee before becoming an official federal employee in October.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His first day was the day Hurricane Milton made landfall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Late Thursday afternoon, Hazelton said he and 11 others at the EMC received a mass email letting them know they were no longer employed at NOAA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cReally unfortunate way of finding out. Our supervisors didn\u2019t even know. We had an emergency meeting to go over everything but it was tough,\u201d said Hazelton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His email access had been turned off by the end of the work day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hazelton said his team was working on building the newest versions of hurricane models to implement in the next hurricane season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to be hard to pick up the slack and, unfortunately, it may degrade or make the forecast less accurate over time. That\u2019s something we really don\u2019t want to see and we hope can be avoided,\u201d said Hazelton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A NOAA spokesperson said the agency does not discuss internal personnel and management matters \u201cas per longstanding practice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNOAA is a federal agency that touches most American lives on a daily basis,\u201d said Gib Brogan, campaign director at Oceana, the largest marine conservation organization in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said he has worked closely with scientists from NOAA for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever have I seen bloat or signs that there are extra resources,\u201d said Brogan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brogan referred to the reported cuts as \u201cirresponsible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCommercial fishermen, beachgoers, the coastal economies that rely on healthy oceans will all be affected by the cuts at NOAA,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In Lakeland, NOAA houses its aircraft operations center and its fleet of Hurricane Hunter planes that provide live data during hurricanes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A city of Lakeland official said he had no knowledge of job cuts locally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re going to jeopardize safety at all,\u201d said Polk County commissioner Bill Braswell. \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t get rid of their pilots for their airplanes or probably their scientists or that sort of stuff. If one does get caught up in that, you realize you\u2019re missing somebody you need and you hire them back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reportedly, the National Weather Service could also be affected by the job cuts, which has an office in Tampa.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This hurricane season, there could be fewer meteorologists collecting data and designing models due to staffing cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). According to The Hill, NOAA… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":35371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"14","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":true,"token":"eyJpbWciOiJodHRwczpcL1wvaTAud3AuY29tXC9sYWtlbGFuZGdhemV0dGUuaW5mb1wvbmV3c1wvd3AtY29udGVudFwvdXBsb2Fkc1wvMjAyM1wvMDhcL05PQUFOV1NMb2dvcy5wbmc_Zml0PTk2MCUyQzQ4MCZzc2w9MSIsInR4dCI6Ik5PQUEgY3V0cyBpbXBhY3QgbWV0ZW9yb2xvZ2lzdHMgaW4gRmxvcmlkYSB3aG8gdHJhY2sgaHVycmljYW5lcyIsInRlbXBsYXRlIjoiaGlnaHdheSIsImJsb2dfaWQiOjE2MzA0MDY2MX0.uytBH4QfekHc51IhtDt9-eZUKRlDDSUqKYIFQSoTv0sMQ"},"version":2,"attached_media":[{"id":35371,"url":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/NOAANWSLogos.png","type":"image\/png"}]},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[11015],"class_list":["post-54331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-noaa-cuts-impact-meteorologists-in-florida-who-track-hurricanes"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54332,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54331\/revisions\/54332"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}