THESE DAYS, WHEN the latest headline about a purge at a federal agency appears, I think about the 30 or so meteorologists and staffers at the National Weather Service here in Seattle.
They’re headquartered in a large room in Building 1 at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offices by Lake Washington, and 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, their forecasts are available to you for free.
They’re an unassuming group, more than willing to spend the time explaining the route of that big windstorm coming in from the ocean.
I was at the Sand Point site in December before the start of the second Trump era, and I met a number of them. Portraits of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris still greeted you at the entrance.
As I write this, an Associated Press story of Feb. 28 headlines, “Firings at U.S. weather and oceans agency risk lives and economy, former agency heads warn.”
So maybe this story will be a goodbye to the Weather Service as we have known it.
The public certainly seems happy with the Weather Service. Along with NASA, it consistently ranks at or near the top for high approval ratings among federal agencies. The details are in a Feb. 2-4 Economist/YouGov poll.
I STARTED ON THIS story back then because we in this region have a particular affinity for anything related to weather.
Over the years, I have had numerous phone contacts with the Weather Service forecasters. Often that was when working a weekend shift, and a story about possible snow in the lowlands needed to be updated.
Somebody always answers the phone at the Sand Point office. The weather isn’t a 9-to-5 deal.
When I needed a quote that would provide context, in layman’s language, the forecasters always helped.
Remember that storm in November that knocked out power on the Eastside but not a place like Vashon Island, which often gets the brunt of storms and ensuing power outages?
“It was not a typical windstorm, which is normally out of the south. This windstorm was primarily an easterly windstorm, pulling air from Eastern Washington,” Kirby Cook, one of the meteorologists, explained.
He said the Cascades act as a wall against these winds, but winds do what winds do. They find gaps, “primarily along the I-90 corridor and south toward Enumclaw.”
See? All in simple terms.
Back in December, I finally got to meet Cook in person. He’s 54 and has been working at Sand Point since 2006. He’s got degrees in meteorology and oceanography.
“The thing I really like was using the science every day,” he tells me. “It’s not about clocking in and clocking out.”
Cook grew up in Salt Lake City, where they’re more used to snow.
He is diplomatic about how Seattleites handle snow. “There are hills here, and they’re very steep.”
Pretty much any weather story gets page views. Are we in for a scorcher? When is the bomb cyclone arriving?
IRONICALLY, BEING IN the crosshairs of Elon Musk, it is through his X site, the former Twitter, that the Weather Service reaches Americans.
Out of 122 offices across the country, it is NWS Seattle that has the most X followers, at nearly 210,000. The next two with large followings are NWS Bay Area and NWS Fort Worth. The Seattle forecasters guess that maybe it’s because we have such a variety of weather.
In that big room in Building 1, there is a bank of six large screens along one wall that show local TV weather broadcasts, highway cams of road conditions and various assorted data. There are rows of desks with computers where the forecasters work.
As I sat beside them, they told me their stories about developing a passion for weather in their childhoods. For them, it was about atmospheric rivers and cold fronts and heat waves, not politics.
They demurred about the recent headlines, referring comments to the National Weather Service press office.
“I come to work every day. There are folks who worry about those things,” one of them tells me about the privatization talk. “But it doesn’t change what we do: Protection of life and property. That’s what we do.”
Susan Buchanan, a spokesperson for the National Weather Service office, emailed, “Per long-standing practice, we are not discussing internal personnel and management matters. NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience. We continue to provide weather information, forecasts and warnings pursuant to our public safety mission. Thanks for your understanding.”
ONE OF THE meteorologists I meet is Reid Wolcott, 40.
“I got interested in weather when the movie ‘Twister’ came about in 1996. I’d have been 12, in sixth grade at Cedar River Elementary in Maple Valley,” he says.
It turned out that for a number of the meteorologists I talked to, “Twister” was embedded in their imaginations.
The film is about tornado-obsessed storm chasers, with plenty of footage of trucks, homes and various other objects flying all over the place.
“I wanted to be the person behind the scenes, doing the forecasting. The science part, that’s exciting to me,” Wolcott tells me.
These days, he has the title of warning coordination meteorologist, which means that when there’s some kind of major weather event, he’s the one talking to various local emergency offices.
Sitting by itself on a desk, there is even an old-fashioned landline that’s nicknamed the “Bat Phone” to reach those emergency offices.
“You hit a button, and you get all the counties at risk on the line,” says Wolcott. Sometimes the emergencies don’t last very long, but you never know. On Nov. 20, Wolcott was on the Bat Phone because of a tornado warning in Grays Harbor County.
It was over in six hours, having turned into a high-wind warning. But the locals knew whether to issue an evacuation advisory.
It is the Weather Service, not a TV weather forecaster or a weather app, that issues such crucial warnings.
Says Keith Seitter, of Boston, the executive director emeritus of the American Meteorological Society, “That has to be a government function. No private-sector company wants to be in a position of making such a warning, or failing to make such a warning, that caused people harm.”
AT ANOTHER DESK at the Sand Point office, there sits an array of electronic equipment that has nothing to do with all else that is computerized in the room. It’s an assortment of amateur radios.
If the cellphones go down, if the cell towers are knocked out, if the internet goes down, if satellite phones go down, if Starlink goes down, if landlines go down, there’s always ham radio and other radio systems.
“It’s a last resort, like if a very large earthquake occurs,” says Wolcott. So far, no such catastrophe has occurred.
But, according to the National Association for Amateur Radio website, “An amateur radio station can be set up almost anywhere in minutes. Hams can quickly raise a wire antenna in a tree or on a mast, connect it to a radio and power source, and communicate effectively with others.”
I stop by Maddie Kristell’s desk. She’s 29 and grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“We sit at around 7,000 feet (in Flagstaff), and we get pretty much every little bit of weather under the sun,” she tells me. “A 5-foot snowstorm, strong winds, even a tornado. When I was in high school, I saw a lot of that, and I wanted to know why it happened.”
And, she says, “I also grew up in very close proximity to where we lost 19 firefighters.”
Kristell is referring to the Yarnell Hill Fire on June 30, 2013, that killed 19 members of an elite central Arizona firefighting crew.
She began work at Sand Point in December 2019 as her husband, Kenton Kristell, an aerospace engineer, found a job in this area.
“I learned right off how invested the public is in the weather,” she says. In Puget Sound, she says, “What will happen may be different 5 or 6 miles down the road.”
She is one of 100 national weather forecasters qualified to go out to wildfires as an incident meteorologist.
The Weather Service explains on its website, ” … weather conditions influence how easily a fire may start, how quickly it spreads and where the fire (and smoke) will move. Lightning strikes in dry areas are a common cause of these fires.”
Kristell spent two weeks at the 37,000-acre Pioneer Fire that started June 8, 2024, southwest of Chelan and slowly spread to the isolated town of Stehekin.
She took boat rides up Lake Chelan to the fire lines, bringing along 75 pounds of weather gear and camping supplies. If there is cellphone coverage, she checks in with her husband. “He’s pretty well aware to what the risks are,” she says. “He’s very supportive.”
IF YOU LOOK AT historical images of the National Weather Service, it is mostly men you see doing the forecasting.
Logan Johnson, meteorologist in charge of the Seattle office, tells me that half of the forecasters at the Seattle office are women. Says Kristell, “Nothing or nobody was going to stop me.”
On this day, she helps make a call on a tsunami warning. A message arrived that morning from the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska.
At around 10:40 a.m., a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Eureka in Northern California. State officials told residents to move to higher ground.
“There was an underlying threat for the Washington coast. We got on a conference call with the Tsunami Warning Center,” says Kristell.
But the earthquake was primarily “strike-slip,” meaning two tectonic plates slid past each other.
“These types of earthquakes are less likely to cause a tsunami because their movement is primarily horizontal with minimal vertical movement of the ocean floor,” the U.S. Geological Survey posted on X.
Time for Kristell to post on X: “No tsunami danger exists for the U.S. west coast.”
I meet Linwood Robinson Jr., who on a regular basis climbs 100 steps to reach one of two Doppler radars in Western Washington. They are two of some 160 nationwide.
They are among the most powerful radars in the world. A Doppler radar sends out pulses of radio waves up to 1,300 times per second at the speed of light, transmitted at 750,000 watts. An average light bulb comes in at only 75 watts.
“It’d fry you from the inside out,” Robinson says of those 750,000 watts.
The radar is encircled by chain-link fencing, with a security cam, a locked gate and an automatic shutoff if someone does manage to get into that radome. It hasn’t happened, says Robinson.
On TV weather forecasts, the colorful Doppler computer-generated images moving across the screen inevitably grab your attention, even if you can’t quite understand them.
Remember: Blue and green? Light-to-moderate rainfall. Red? Very heavy rainfall. When it comes to wind, the brighter the color, the faster it is storming across.
If you take a drive on Camano Island, near Chase Way and Saratoga Hills Drive, you’ll see this mammoth structure with a 39-foot ball at the top — a radome made of foam insulation sandwiched between fiberglass.
When he reaches the radome, Robinson always stops to take in the view over the treetops. “It’s pretty amazing,” he says.
He’s 56, and in 2013, after 24 years as a radar technician with the Air Force, he began doing the same thing with the Weather Service here. He’s in shape and able to make those 100 steps with ease.
Robinson also makes the three-hour drive from Seattle to Langley Hill near Copalis Beach in Grays Harbor County. That’s the location of the second Doppler radar, finally built in 2011 after years of community lobbying.
Because of the Olympic Mountains, the Doppler radar on Camano Island wasn’t able to survey the coastal area.
With that second radar, said a Weather Service spokesperson back then, “We’ll see storms as they move onshore like we never had before.”
The radars got their name from Christian Doppler, an Austrian physicist who in 1842 figured out the revolutionary “Doppler effect.”
When you hear an ambulance siren sound different as it approaches, passes, and moves away from you, that’s the Doppler effect that is the science behind the radar images.
At the sites, Robinson does everything from software measurements to cleaning the cabinets of dust and dirt. He says the maintenance manual on the radar “is 10-plus volumes.” It’s a complicated thing, a Doppler radar.
He even oils the pedestal on which the solid-steel radar weighing several thousand pounds sits.
All that Doppler radar data is free to the public, and to any private weather companies that want to use the information for specialized forecasting.
Each day, the Weather Service collects about 6.3 billion observations. It issues approximately 1.5 million forecasts and 50,000 warnings annually.
MANY OF THE Trump administration’s actions are based on, as a blueprint, Project 2025, a 922-page document from the conservative Heritage Foundation, said a New York Times article of Feb. 8. That document calls for the “breakup” of NOAA and says the NWS should “fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”
And what would that mean?
“The MAGA plan to end free weather reports,” warned the headline in a July 16, 2024, article in The Atlantic, which imagined a future in which only some municipalities “are able to pay for the best forecasts.”
One of the newest hires at the Seattle office is Melissa Gonzalez-Fuentes. She is 27 and began working as a meteorologist at Sand Point in August 2024.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in meteorology in 2019 at San Jose State University and then went to graduate school at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
“I especially liked the heavier math courses — how the atmosphere works. It’s kind of like solving a puzzle,” she says.
Gonzalez-Fuentes grew up in Salinas, California, one of five children. Her dad drives a tractor for a lettuce company. Her mom is a delivery driver.
She is fluent in Spanish. In December, one small bit of work she did was helping the King County Regional Homeless Authority. On its Facebook page, it was running tips on staying warm in your car during cold weather and wanted the tips translated to Spanish.
That was before Trump designated English as the official language of this country.
I watched her as she carefully went through the math for flight conditions at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“You know the math and everything, but being operational is different from being in a classroom. They take these seriously. It means money,” she says about visibility conditions.
I called the Sand Point office in early March. The headlines about the firings, especially of recent hires, were a daily occurrence.
Gonzalez-Fuentes was still on the job.
“This was my dream job, the Weather Service,” she told me back in December.
