Layoffs last week at NOAA’s Office of Aircraft Operations, home of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters, threaten to reduce the quality of data critical for hurricane monitoring, prediction, and warning. On February 28, NOAA terminated two flight directors and one electronic engineer. Hurricane Hunters fly into active storms to collect data used for weather forecasts. One might think that the firing of just three crew members in an organization that employs nearly 100 of them wouldn’t be a big deal. But it so happened that two of the probationary employees who had been on the job for less than two years were flight directors, the job I held from 1986 to 1990. This is particularly problematic since every Hurricane Hunter mission is required to carry a flight director—a meteorologist who’s charged with ensuring the safety of the mission from a meteorological perspective. Ride through the eyewall of Hurricane #Helene aboard @NOAA WP-3D Orion #NOAA42 "Kermit" during our evening mission on Sept. 26, 2024. This mission gathered crucial data of a large hurricane intensifying before landfall. Find NOAA resources on continuing impacts and post storm… pic.twitter.com/qv0QxLzjp2— NOAA Aircraft Operations Center (@NOAA_HurrHunter) September 27, 2024 In order to keep all three NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft operating 24/7 during a significant hurricane, NOAA has in the past had eight crews, and thus eight flight directors. With the loss of two flight directors, NOAA is down to just six of these key crew members. This will barely be enough to keep the planes in the air for the twice-daily flights that occur during a significant hurricane threat. And as explained in an interview with NBC by Kerri Englert, one of the fired flight directors, NOAA had aimed to have 10 flight director positions filled. But after she and another flight director were terminated, that left just six. Now, she said, if one flight director is sick, there will be fewer Hurricane Hunter flights. And we shouldn’t be surprised if further staff depletions occur before hurricane season. I know that if I still had my old job as a flight director for NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters, worries about my job security would have me looking hard for new employment. “Indiscriminately firing skilled workers is bad in private business. Add the threat to public safety caused by haphazard and indiscriminate layoffs, and the government actions are impossible to justify by any rational, performance-based standard,” hurricane expert Bryan Norcross wrote this week. MY OPINION: There was a plan to dismember and partially privatize NOAA and the National Weather Service in 1995. It was a bad idea then, and weakening those critical public-safety agencies is a worse idea now. More at bit.ly/4ioxHqu— Bryan Norcross (@bnorcross.bsky.social) 2025-03-03T14:22:43.775Z The value of the NOAA Hurricane Hunters The Air Force, which maintains a fleet of 10 Hurricane Hunter aircraft, has not been affected by budget cuts. Thus, the loss of a NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft because of short staffing will not greatly reduce the overall quantity of flights undertaken. However, it will significantly reduce the quality of the data collected, potentially negatively impacting hurricane forecasts. The NOAA aircraft include two heavy-duty P-3 Orions that penetrate into the eye of a hurricane and one high-altitude Gulfstream IV jet that collects data around the periphery. All of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft—both Air Force and NOAA—feed data into the computer models used to forecast hurricanes. This includes data from instruments mounted on the aircraft as well as “dropsonde” data from probes launched from the aircraft that fall on parachutes through the storm. But only NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft carry Doppler radars, which capture a detailed 3D picture of the entire storm every few seconds. Figure 1. Summary of operations by the NOAA Hurricane Hunters and NOAA Hurricane Research Division in 2024 (Image credit: NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory ) Data from these Doppler radars are fed into three of our top hurricane models: the newer HAFS-A and HAFS-B and the older HWRF. The two newer models made the best intensity forecasts of any of the models for two of the most damaging hurricanes of 2024, Milton and Beryl, and also did very well for Helene. In many cases, the HAFS-A and HAFS-B forecasts were far superior to the official intensity forecasts from the National Hurricane Center. Without data from the NOAA Hurricane Hunters, it is dubious that these models would have performed as well—and the National Hurricane Center official forecasts would likely have been less accurate. A 2024 study found that assimilation of the data from the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 2007 to 2022 into one of the top hurricane intensity models, the HWRF, helped reduce its intensity forecast errors by 45%–50%. Bumpy ride into Hurricane #Milton on @NOAA WP-3D Orion #NOAA