My worry for the 2025 hurricane season was what I labeled early-on as an “incendiary” mix of more frequent and extreme weather events with a degraded ability to save life and property.
With the end of hurricane season in sight, here’s an update of where things stand.
We haven’t had a large number of tropical storms and hurricanes, but the ones that formed have been disproportionately strong. This led to catastrophic consequences for western Jamaica, devastation in eastern Cuba, and significant impacts in parts of Haiti, the Bahamas and Bermuda.
Meanwhile, the diminished ability to study, monitor, forecast, warn for, and recover from more intense hurricanes and other hazards like flooding, heat waves and wildfires was—and continues to be—a source of unease.
Study the weather: Forecasting, warning and communicating about severe weather has improved immensely over the recent decades thanks to our ability to better understand the hazards and the physics that drive them. When we study the phenomena, we get better at keeping people safe.
As of this writing, the fiscal 2026 budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had yet to be approved. The White House budget proposal includes severe cuts and shuttering of national laboratories such as the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL). Work in congressional appropriations committees makes it clear that there is significant support for NOAA and disdain for the current White House budget.
Monitor the weather: One of the first and most noticeable impacts of the so-called DOGE cuts early in 2025 was a deterioration the United States’ network of weather observing systems. When hundreds of NOAA and National Weather Service (NWS) staff were fired or offered early retirements, it degraded and sometimes ended what was once a 24/7 effort to keep people informed and safe from impactful weather.
Many NWS offices saw 50% reduction in staff. Some, including Miami, are still working with about half the number of meteorologists they once had, according to my private conversations with colleagues there. Weather balloons that collected crucial and granular observations of the atmosphere stopped being released as often. Big data gaps formed in what was once the most robust weather monitoring apparatus on the planet.
Despite being down 40-50% staff, according to HRD’s director emeritus Dr. Robert Atlas, NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters continued to fulfill their valuable mission. How did they do it? They brought back retired employees willing to keep the life-saving mission going, according to the former chief of the National Hurricane Center forecast branch Dr. James Franklin.
Forecast the weather: The United States ability to forecast the weather has deteriorated. The American GFS model’s skill is so pitiful right now that, at times, forecasters are completely disregarding its projections. This happened during Hurricane Melissa, in which the GFS was constantly and consistently wrong in forecasting an early north turn into Hispaniola instead of a later turn into Jamaica.
Hurricane intensity forecasts were off in 2025 too. Through October 23, National Hurricane Center 72 hour intensity forecasts for tropical storms were off by an average of 17 miles per hour versus the five year mean of 13 mph. Thankfully, Artificial Intelligence models like Google DeepMind stepped up. AI models don’t need weather balloon data to forecast and proved to be more accurate during the 2025 season than the official NHC projections!
Warn for weather: In 2025, NWS warnings still went out despite the cuts already in place. But in a tragic twist, they may not have reached everyone. After the 4th of July flooding in Texas Hill Country this year, questions arose about timely NWS warnings never reaching those in peril. At the San Antonio TX office, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist position, responsible for seamless warning dissemination, was vacant due to DOGE.
There’s no telling what other surprises may come from a lack of seasoned personnel at NWS. While the government announced that 450 meteorologists would be hired to remedy the DOGE carnage, it will take months for those vacancies to be filled.
Recover from weather: After floating the idea of completely dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the latest push from Washington is to have states pick up much of the cost of disaster recovery. And while the federal response to the Texas flash floods in July was on par with past major disasters, there is evidence that FEMA relief is lagging for events not making front-page news.
The agency is suffering from a significant staffing shortage. Its acting director David Richardson made headlines for supposedly “joking” about not knowing there was a hurricane season. He later admitted with two weeks to go before the start of the season that he hadn’t crafted a plan for 2025.
Given everything that could’ve gone wrong this hurricane season, I consider us in the U.S. to have been very, very fortunate in 2025. It’s the first season without a landfalling U.S. hurricane since 2015. People in Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, and especially Jamaica, were not as lucky.
These priority and funding battles will continue into the New Year. Science at the service of society must continue to be defended—on all fronts.
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