Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/05/16/weather-service-offices-overnight-cuts-map/
Archive: https://archive.ph/V1X06
For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country.
In four of the agency’s 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren’t enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.
Each of the offices has local knowledge about weather hazards and geographic features that helps improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and warnings and inform local officials’ decisions to close schools for wintry weather or evacuate residents ahead of hurricanes. Without a meteorologist working overnight, those offices’ duties to monitor conditions and issue forecasts and warnings will temporarily pass to neighboring offices each night, said Tom Fahy, the union’s legislative director.
At an agency whose staff have a strong commitment to their lifesaving work, he said, the circumstances have stretched employees’ resilience “to the breaking point” and “hobbled the agency’s esprit de corps.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the Weather Service, “remains adequately staffed to ensure that critical research continues and that actionable data continues to be released to the public as regularly scheduled,” spokeswoman Kim Doster said in an email. “NOAA anticipates no loss of critical information to the American people.”
The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”
Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.
Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.
California and the West
Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.
The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.
It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.
The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.
The Plains
A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.
It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.
A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.
These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.
The Eastern U.S.
There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.
Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.
Archive: https://archive.ph/V1X06
For at least half a century, the National Weather Service has been an around-the-clock operation. But after the U.S. DOGE Service led efforts to shrink the federal government, that is no longer possible in some parts of the country.
In four of the agency’s 122 weather forecasting offices around the country, there aren’t enough meteorologists to staff an overnight shift, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing agency workers. And at least several more forecast offices are expected to stop staffing an overnight shift as early as Sunday.
Each of the offices has local knowledge about weather hazards and geographic features that helps improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and warnings and inform local officials’ decisions to close schools for wintry weather or evacuate residents ahead of hurricanes. Without a meteorologist working overnight, those offices’ duties to monitor conditions and issue forecasts and warnings will temporarily pass to neighboring offices each night, said Tom Fahy, the union’s legislative director.
At an agency whose staff have a strong commitment to their lifesaving work, he said, the circumstances have stretched employees’ resilience “to the breaking point” and “hobbled the agency’s esprit de corps.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the Weather Service, “remains adequately staffed to ensure that critical research continues and that actionable data continues to be released to the public as regularly scheduled,” spokeswoman Kim Doster said in an email. “NOAA anticipates no loss of critical information to the American people.”
The agency is meanwhile seeking to transfer employees to the most critically understaffed offices to fill gaps. Doster said it is also seeking hiring authority — NOAA and the Weather Service remain subject to a hiring freeze imposed in January — while also pursuing “a reevaluation of resource allocation and priorities across all line offices within the bureau.”
Weather Service staffing numbered more than 4,200 employees before President Donald Trump took office for his second term. But so far this year, the workforce has contracted by nearly 600 people — the same number of departures the agency saw across the past decade and a half, Fahy said.
Here is where those departures are hitting hardest.
California and the West
Weather Service forecast offices in Hanford, California, and Sacramento, in the state’s agricultural and mostly rural Central Valley, are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, leaving coastal offices that oversee the Bay Area and greater Los Angeles to cover for them.
The cutback in operating hours comes just as the traditional wildfire season begins in California. The Weather Service plays a key role in forecasting when dry air and strong winds elevate risks of fires sparking and spreading rapidly.
It is also expected that a Weather Service office in Pendleton, Oregon, which oversees a wide swath of southern Washington and northwestern Oregon, will soon be unable to operate overnight, though it was not yet clear when that might happen, Fahy said.
The overnight closure of the forecast office in Fairbanks, Alaska, affects most of that state’s land area — all of northern Alaska, including towns all along its Arctic coastline and the Bering Strait.
The Plains
A forecast office in sparsely populated northwestern Kansas has been one of the hardest hit by retirements and firings and is no longer operating overnight, Fahy said.
It is one of the facilities Weather Service officials are asking employees to voluntarily transfer to, offering paid moving expenses. Positions for three senior meteorologists at the Kansas office are among 155 critical vacancies at Weather Service offices that the agency is seeking to fill by the end of the month, according to an email sent to agency employees that was obtained by The Washington Post.
A forecasting office that oversees conditions across southwestern Wyoming and eastern Nebraska is scheduled to stop staffing an overnight shift Sunday, Fahy said.
These offices lie in what is called “Tornado Alley,” and as peak tornado season continues, this area is at the heart of a swath that has faced relentless thunderstorms, twisters and flooding rains for weeks this year.
The Eastern U.S.
There are some critical vacancies at offices along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast — including offices in Texas and Louisiana that are facing the threat of tropical cyclones when hurricane season starts June 1. But so far, the densely populated eastern part of the country is not affected by overnight Weather Service closures.
Still, one office in eastern Kentucky — a region hit repeatedly by deadly and damaging floods in recent years — is already closing for the overnight hours. And a facility on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is expected to begin overnight closures Sunday.
