Hurricane forecasting is casualty in the war on climate science

On May 25, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration checked their satellite data, crunched the numbers on ocean temperatures, water currents and weather patterns, and made a prediction. They said this would be an above-normal hurricane season, with 11 to 17 named storms and two to four major hurricanes churning through the Atlantic.

Then they really got to work. The first of the named storms, Arlene, had already jumped the gun in April, forming in the Atlantic weeks before the official opening of the hurricane season. The folks at NOAA knew if they applied the latest in science and technology, they could save lives.

The scientists at the NOAA offices in Boulder, at Princeton and around the country had a new tool — the Finite-volume on a Cubed-sphere (FV3) — which produces better models and helps them forecast hurricanes more accurately so that residents can be warned as early as possible on whether to shelter in place, evacuate or seek safe harbor.

So five days before Harvey hit, NOAA’S Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory used the fabulous FV3 to predict that the storm would develop a second eyewall and produce extreme rainfall across the region. Both predictions as well as those about the path of the storm were spot on.

Residents and public officials relied on the forecasts, and as a result the death toll was remarkably low for a storm of such magnitude in the fourth-largest city in the U.S. Early reports are that 60 people died in Harvey, compared to 1,833 in Hurricane Katrina and 117 in Superstorm Sandy.

Before the FV3 came online, hurricane forecasting in the U.S. was significantly less sophisticated than that of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. It was not quite an embarrassment, but clearly sub-optimal.

In 2012, scientists in the U.S. were unable to forecast Hurricane Sandy’s path with any degree of accuracy, while the European team predicted with confidence that it was going to turn toward New Jersey.

Hurricane forecasting, as well as predicting the whole gamut of extreme weather events from droughts and blizzards to tornadoes and tsunamis, is critical for saving lives and minimizing property damage.

And the high-powered computing and data-gathering technology also is essential for understanding climate change.

Which is why the Trump administration’s budget calls for crippling the program.

Under Trump’s plan, NOAA’S budget is to be slashed by one-fifth, including eliminating programs to improve the agency’s ability to predict tornadoes and to create a tsunami-warning program for the West Coast. The budget for weather satellites — vitally important in hurricane forecasting — is to be cut by 17 percent.

While the Trump administration is laser-focused on jobs for coal miners, it’s busy planning for widespread layoffs of climate scientists who are accused of doing “crazy stuff” — like accurately predicting hurricanes.

“We simply try to get things back in order so we can look at the folks who pay the taxes and say: ‘look, yeah we want to do some climate science but we’re not going to do some of the crazy stuff the previous administration did,’ ” said Trump’s budget chief Mick Mulvaney as he tried to justify the cuts in the budget he released last May.

He attempted to argue the administration isn’t anti-science, but the evidence to the contrary couldn’t be any clearer.

So if you’re a cutting-edge climate scientist/hurricane forecaster, it might be a very good time to accept President Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to move to France, where you can do your work with decent resources and without hostility and ridicule.

If you’re an American taxpayer, you can rest assured that your money isn’t being spent on crazy stuff like hurricane forecasting. Instead $1.6 billion is in the budget for a down payment on the wall along the border with Mexico.

And if you live along the coast, oh well. Buy a raincoat.

Diane Carman is a communications consultant and a regular columnist for The Denver Post.