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According to new employee union data, certain National Weather Service offices in California are among the hardest hit by meteorologist vacancy. It raises concerns as the nation contends with the ongoing threat of another catastrophic fire season and extreme weather.
The shortage of staffing has forced some offices to outsource overnight operations to nearby offices. Or they were forced to reduce the frequency of decision makers and publishing forecast products that keep them abreast of potentially dangerous weather conditions.
Trump administration officials have rejected the idea that recent cuts put the Weather Service’s operations at risk. Once fire season is strengthened, California becomes an important test case to determine the impact of the cut.
Two of the country’s weather forecasting offices with the worst meteorologist vacancy rates are located in California. They are the Hanford offices covering the San Joaquin Valley, including Fresno and Bakersfield. The Sacramento office also covers Stockton, Modesto, Balejo, Chico and Reading.
The office is also head of West Sierra Nevada. The Hanford office oversees forecasts for Yosemite, Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park. The Sacramento Office handles Lassen Volcano National Park.
Each weather services office covering California should have between 13 and 16 meteorologists on staff.
However, Hanford Office has five meteorologists on staff compared to eight vacant seats, according to figures provided by the National Weather Service Employees Organization. This 62% vacancy rate is the worst in the country and is linked to Goodland, Kansas, according to Tom Fahy, legislative director of the NWS Employees Organization.
“Hanford is one of the poorest offices of personnel in the country,” Fahee said.
The Sacramento office is the second-highest Western vacancy rate in the nation, with staff having just eight meteorologists and eight vacant seats on its staff, Fahy said. The Sacramento office has assigned 16 meteorologist positions because it is necessary to contact officials in the state capital, according to Alex Tardi, a former warning adjustment meteorologist at the San Diego office of the weather forecast service.
According to Fahy, National Weather Service has reduced its staff of 4,369 to 3,757 due to a combination of layoffs and acquisitions. That’s a 14% decrease.
With staff cuts, this means that Hanford and Sacramento weather services offices do not have enough staff to operate consistently overnight, and need to be covered by nearby offices. In the Hanford office, calls received between midnight and 6am were handled by the San Diego office this week.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Tardy, who owns Weather Echo, a weather and climate information consulting business. “I worked for 32 years [with the National Weather Service]I worked a few solo midnight shifts, and even that raised an eyebrow for safety reasons. So it’s a big deal when the office comes out and says, “We’re not staffed for the night shifts from midnight until 6am.” ”
The Sacramento office was open this week overnight, supported by temporary staff assigned by another office.
The third largest seating rate nationwide was in offices in Cheyenne, Wyoming and Rapid City, SD.
Another area of concern is two weather offices serving Houston and Lake Charles (LA). There are currently eight meteorologists in Lake Charles’ offices with five empty seats. The Houston office, which covers the neighborhood, has nine meteorologists on staff, but has four vacant seats.
Given that the southeastern Texas region is “a major hurricane entry point,” Fahe said, staff shortages “will become a problem.”
President Trump has tried to discount criticism that recent federal cuts to the National Weather Service played a role in Texas’ recent flood disaster. “This happened in seconds. … They said they’ve never seen anything like this in 100 years. …It’s just horrifying,” he told reporters earlier this month.
The National Weather Service has warned of possible flash flooding ahead of the July 4 disaster, and issued a flood clock for more than 12 hours before flooding surges at Camp Mystic, where at least 27 campers and counselors have died.
Fahy said the National Weather Service’s Austin/San Antonio office had five forecasters working on that shift, compared to the usual two or three, and staffed them appropriately on disaster nights. And the Austin/San Antonio office actually has a relatively low vacancy rate. There are 11 meteorologists currently on staff.
However, given the large staff availability at other weather forecast offices across the country, he warned that other offices could be nervous to deal with a major weather emergency.
“If there’s a massive rain event like you’ve had in your car [County]Texas… Now in half a dozen cities around the US, I tremble at the thought of what will happen,” Fahee said.
National Weather Service spokesman Erica Grow CEI said the agency is working on the vacancy caused by the acquisition by temporarily relocating other staff to cover key vacancy. The agency also said it would hire for “a targeted number of permanent mission-critical field positions under the exception of a sector-wide employment freeze.”
Although weather offices can temporarily serve as staff for shifts in emergencies, it is not common for weather offices to miss out on a small number of meteorologists for more than a few months, Tardy said.
“We didn’t have that situation. We’re in unknown territory,” Tardy said.
This poses risk as California enters its peak wildfire season. There, a mixture of dry bone vegetation and fierce winds can, and often, spell out, disasters. Autumn and winter bring about a mixture of whipping in extreme weather. In some areas, dangerous fire conditions are extended just before rain, sudden landslides and fatal snowstorms arrive.
For example, weather services during fires have a huge demand. If there is a wildfire in California, each weather office should make it available to accident meteorologists to head to the incident command post, which is an agreement with agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and the California Forestry and Fire Prevention Department. This will make the Weather Bureau a different predictor, Tardy said perhaps for weeks.
In addition, shortages can be delayed in issuing several major weather updates and alerts, such as heat watches and fire watches.
“Let’s say you’re working on a midnight shift and you’re in San Diego. But you’re covering for Sacramento, right?
Also, it is not ideal to rely on suburban meteorologists regularly, as background knowledge of unique regional weather patterns can help predict.
With the extent to which staff cuts were revealed in April, the Sacramento National Weather Service’s office has reduced staffing from 6pm to 6am, saying “the heavy forecasts… will take place during day shifts.” The office said it “poorly posts and monitors” on X and its Facebook accounts. He said both are important resources to understand weather development across the state.
The Sacramento Office has begun to shorten the format by publishing only one area prediction discussion per day rather than twice. The portion where we discuss fire weather data is also updated only once a day.
All of these developments could break down services that are useful for officials at all levels, such as live weather briefings where decision makers and reporters can ask questions, as well as YouTube recordings and emails to staff and reporters, Tardy said.
In particular, the briefing by Tardy and the Oxnard office of the Weather Bureau have become an important source of information during recent major weather events, including forecasting fire weather and warnings for serious winter storms.
Before he retired, Tardy was a warning-adjusted meteorologist for the San Diego Weather Service. This is the management team that consistently reaches out to first responders and emergency managers to form relationships that can be important in emergencies. The warning-adjusting meteorologist position remains vacant in both the San Diego office, which also covers Orange County and the Inland Empire, and Oxnard, which handles Los Angeles, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties.
Warning Adjustment Meteorologists are responsible for teaching emergency managers what a particular type of weather warning means. For example, if these positions are open for six months and “you’re really beginning to lose your relationship with local officials,” Tardy said.
Another concern about the shortage is that the remaining employees will be overworked and burned out, and may choose to leave as job satisfaction decreases, Tardy said. No new jobs have been listed for weather services as employment freezes were ordered in late January, but despite permission to hire a certain number of new employees,
“Overuse of employees leads to people finding other jobs or simply quitting,” Tardy said. Even if a new job today is posted, Tardy said it would take time to actually speed up fresh recruits.
“Every week, every month it goes through, these offices are more stressful,” he said.
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