Cuts to U.S. weather agency will be felt in Canada — especially in hurricane season

A meteorologist who made a life-saving call to a Newfoundland mayor urging him to evacuate residents from the path of post-tropical storm Fiona in 2022 says cuts to weather services in the United States could have impacts in hurricane-prone Atlantic Canada.

Eddie Sheerr is among a growing number of Canadian meteorologists and scientists sounding the alarm about sweeping cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, made by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency run by billionaire Elon Musk.

Sheerr, a meteorologist with NTV in St. John’s, N.L., said he uses NOAA’s data and modelling “literally every day.”

“They have some of the best hurricane forecasters and meteorologists in the world. I rely on that data and their expertise heavily when tracking these tropical systems, as do meteorologists throughout the country,” he said in a recent interview.

“They provide life-saving information. Period.”

Hundreds of weather forecasters and other NOAA employees lost their jobs last month amid sweeping layoffs across the U.S. government carried out by Musk’s department. As of Monday, roughly 1,300 NOAA staff members had resigned or had been laid off, and about 1,000 more layoffs were expected, according to the New York Times.

The agency publishes daily weather forecasts and issues warnings for tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis, wildfires and floods. It includes the National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Centre, which tracks, studies and predicts hurricanes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Sheerr said he was using NOAA data when he decided to phone Mayor Brian Button in Port aux Basques the night before Fiona slammed into the community on Newfoundland’s southwestern tip in September 2022.

He said he figured people would tell the mayor they’d seen plenty of bad storms. “And I said, ‘Brian, you haven’t seen this before,’” Sheerr said. “‘And that’s what you need to tell the residents.’”

Sheerr urged Button to evacuate homes closest to the water, and Button took his advice. The storm destroyed about 100 houses in the area and swept a woman out to sea.

Data from NOAA makes Canadian forecasts and weather warnings more accurate, Sheerr said, adding that he worries the cuts to NOAA will reduce the accuracy of forecasts and ultimately make it harder to predict the impacts of dangerous storms.

“The less data a computer model has, the less accurate its depiction may be,” he said. “And as that depiction is then taken as a snapshot to make subsequent forecasts, your errors could be bigger.”

In a social media post, Ryan Snoddon, a meteorologist with CBC News in the Maritimes, said cuts to the U.S. weather service will be felt in Atlantic Canada. The agency’s weather balloons provide “very important” forecasting data and insight during storms, he wrote on the Bluesky platform last week.

Data is already missing since some weather balloon launches have been cancelled amid the staffing cuts, said Jim Abraham, who was the first manager of the Canadian Hurricane Centre.

The layoffs at NOAA have been “chaotic” and there seems to be no real plan for what will get cut and what won’t, the retired Environment Canada meteorologist said in an interview. So far, it’s been hard to measure what the impacts of those cuts will be.

“That measurement will become more significant here in Atlantic Canada during hurricane season,” said Abraham, who lives in Halifax. “Because in those severe weather events, we do an enormous amount of collaboration and coordination with our colleagues in the United States.”

Anya Waite, an oceanographer at Dalhousie University, said NOAA is a “huge engine” of information and a major funder of important research. It can also combine ocean and atmosphere data in a way other agencies cannot, she said in an interview.

“Our weather forecasts will deteriorate without NOAA data,” the chief executive and scientific director at Dalhousie’s Ocean Frontier Institute said. “And this is a time when we care a lot about the weather. Our climate is changing, and weather systems like hurricanes are becoming more of a threat to us.”

Waite said she was concerned that plans for a NOAA project to improve forecasting of the intensity of storms would be compromised or shelved. “That kind of information is really important for coastal planning, for our infrastructure, for insurance companies,” she said.

“It’s life saving-information,” she added. “That’s exactly what it is.”

— With files from The Associated Press

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