The Trump administration is planning to make drastic cuts to the weather satellite budget of the National Weather Service’s parent organization, NOAA, the Washington Post reports. Weather experts interviewed by the post stated that these proposed cuts would impair the Weather Service’s forecasting ability in a number of critical ways that would endanger Americans including hurricane and tornado forecasts.
The apparent motivation for these cuts is the elimination of climate science satellites. The people proposing these cuts don't seem to understand that climate science is the integration and analysis of weather data over time. Satellites provide critical instantaneous data on weather, sea ice and crop conditions that are used commercially by public and private organizations to make decisions that are critical to protecting life, transporting goods, growing food and managing water supplies, etc.
The Weather Service’s capabilities to forecast and monitor storms like Sandy that ravaged trillions of dollars of infrastructure up and down the east coast will be damaged by Trump’s planned cuts.
Trump also plans massive cuts to NOAA’s coastal programs. They assert they want to transfer the money to defense, apparently not aware that the Norfolk naval base is under attack by rapid sea level rise related to climate change. The Navy Times reported that sea level rise threatens to inundate 128 military bases. Navy base Norfolk is the world’s largest naval base, critical to our national security, built at a cost of many billions of dollars. Cuts to coastal programs and climate studies will have devastating impacts on navy bases world wide, with Norfolk being among the most heavily impacted.
The Trump administration will damage national security, homeland security, critical infrastructure and the economy if congress enacts these reckless cuts. We must stop them.
President Donald Trump's administration is seeking to slash one of the government's premier climate science agencies by 17 percent, delivering steep cuts to research funding and satellite programs, according to a four-page budget memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would also eliminate funding for a variety of smaller programs including external research, coastal management, estuary reserves and "coastal resilience," which seeks to bolster the ability of coastal areas to withstand major storms and rising seas.
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The Office of Management and Budget outline for Commerce for fiscal year 2018 proposed sharp reductions in specific areas within NOAA, such as spending on education, grants, and research. NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would lose $126 million, or 26 percent, of the funds it has under the current budget. Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal.