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Only days after the U.S. Department of Defense abruptly announced the immediate termination of satellite data critical to hurricane forecasts \u2013 granted a moratorium early Monday through July<\/a> \u2013 NOAA posted details of its 2026 budget request to Congress<\/a>, which closes more than a dozen world-class weather and climate facilities across the U.S., including Miami\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though budget estimates\u00a0released by the White House at the end of May\u00a0outlined draconian cuts to critical NOAA programs, the details released by NOAA confirm a catastrophic hit for the nation\u2019s hurricane forecasting capabilities if approved by Congress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The calamitous cuts include the elimination of all federally funded meteorological, oceanographic, and climate\u00a0labs<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0non-profit cooperative research institutes<\/a>\u00a0across America. These world-class centers of excellence employ hundreds of the nation\u2019s top weather and climate scientists and deploy key technology to help forecasters accurately predict the world\u2019s most extreme weather. The history of many of the over two dozen labs and institutes slated for closure stretches back 50 to 75 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A generational loss for hurricane forecasting<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the NOAA labs most instrumental to hurricane forecasting is Miami\u2019s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory or AOML, a fixture on Virginia Key since the early 1970s, and its Hurricane Research Division (HRD), which develops and maintains the state-of-the-art hurricane models deployed by the National Hurricane Center throughout the season. With the proposed shuttering of AOML, HRD, and their sister cooperative institutes starting in 2026, forecasters could lose all tools currently available to estimate and forecast hurricane intensity. It\u2019s a seismic blow to the arsenal of tools forecasters rely on to confidently deliver timely and accurate predictions of threatening hurricanes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though all NOAA labs and institutes \u2013 including the National Severe Storms Laboratory of Twister fame in Norman, Oklahoma \u2013 account for less than 5% of NOAA\u2019s annual budget and less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the total federal budget, they have provided an outsized return to the U.S. economy. A 2024 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research<\/a> found that the improvements made to hurricane forecasts alone from 2007 to 2020 amounted to an average savings of $5 billion per hurricane. The amount saved in one hurricane hit from these programs is larger than the entire budget proposed to fund NOAA in 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hurricane hunter flights scaled back<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n One of the tools hurricane forecasters rely on most is the NOAA hurricane hunters, a fleet of airplanes that routinely take the direct path into the eye of dangerous hurricanes to gather critical data for forecasters on the ground. In 2024, NOAA personnel conducted 67 missions aboard its three hurricane hunter planes, racking up an incredible 521 flight hours, dropping over 1,400 dropsonde instruments, and providing almost 200 three-dimensional radar scans from inside hurricanes that helped make NHC forecasts the most accurate in history<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NOAA\u2019s 2026 budget, by eliminating AOML, eliminates the scientific support behind its hurricane hunter missions, including scientists collecting data from hurricane hunters and making sure they\u2019re included in hurricane forecast models. NOAA is proposing a significant reduction in flight hours for its hurricane hunter aircraft in 2026 \u2013 a 52% and 33% reduction from flight hours in 2023 and 2024, respectively \u2013 largely due to the elimination of its research laboratories and related goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/13534f5e-10ed-44e9-acaa-3cc671b1d12b_4032x3024.webp?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1\")