Officials faulted over integrity of statement on storm’s path

WASHINGTON — An investigation conducted on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra- tion found that agency leadership violated its scientific integrity policy through actions that led to the release of a statement that backed President Donald Trump’s false statement about the path of Hurricane Dorian.

The NOAA statement, issued Sept. 6, 2019, contradicted its own meteorologists at a weather forecast office in Birmingham, Ala.

The scandal over the forecast for Hurricane Dorian has come to be known as “Sharpiegate,” after Trump modified an NOAA forecast map shown in an oval office briefing to depict the storm threatening Alabama.

The report, whose findings were accepted by NOAA’s leadership and released Monday, found that Neil Jacobs, the acting administrator, and former NOAA deputy chief of staff and communications director Julie Kay Roberts twice violated codes of the agency’s scientific integrity policy.

“It will be clear to anyone reviewing the accounts captured in this highly credible, independent Scientific Integrity report that the political leaders who interfered in our emergency response system need to publicly apologize or resign,” said Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y., who had filed a complaint and is the sponsor of a bill that would make such violations more accountable across federal science agencies.

NOAA’s scientific integrity policy prohibits political interference with the conduct and communication of the agency’s scientific findings.

The investigation, requested by two NOAA employees, a former agency administrator, Tonko and others, was conducted on NOAA’s behalf by a panel assembled by the National Academy of Public Administration, a nonprofit, nonpartisan institution dedicated to facilitating good governance.

The requests were made in the wake of NOAA’s issuance of a September 2019 statement that criticized the National Weather Service forecast office in Birmingham for a tweet that contradicted Trump’s inaccurate assertion from Sept. 1, in which the president claimed that Alabama “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by the Category 5 storm.

That statement embroiled NOAA in a storm of controversy over whether there was political interference with the scientific agency responsible for issuing life-saving severe weather warnings. The statement was widely interpreted within NOAA’s National Weather Service as contradicting an accurate forecast because of political pressure from the White House and the Department of Commerce.

The investigation recommends no punishment for either Jacobs or Roberts. Instead it recommends that various guidelines and training materials be updated, and changes made to the integrity policy procedures to ensure that a similar act does not occur.

It specifically calls for NOAA or other agencies to investigate alleged violations of scientific integrity when they involve senior NOAA and Commerce political leadership, and it advocates mandatory scientific integrity training.

Roberts has since moved on to a position in the Commerce Department.

Trump has nominated Jacobs to lead the government’s oceans and atmospheric science agency, and his nomination has cleared the Senate Commerce Committee. These findings and the pending results of a Commerce Department inspector general’s report may cloud his prospects on the Senate floor.