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The U.S. Weather Enterprise: A National Treasure at Risk

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A Statement of the American Meteorological Society

U.S. leadership in scientific innovation is at risk due to the recent and ongoing reductions in U.S. federal science capabilities. The consequences to the American people will be large and wide-ranging, including increased vulnerability to hazardous weather.

The federal science workforce and federal investments in science are central to the success of the weather enterprise–the partnership between public, private, academic, and non-governmental organizations that provides information and services to protect people, businesses, and the environment. Estimates of the value of weather and climate information to the U.S. economy exceed $100 billion annually,1 roughly 10 times the investment made by U.S. taxpayers through the federal agencies involved in weather-related science and services. It is an internationally recognized and highly respected means of multiplying value and benefits to the American people.

Recent terminations within the government workforce for science are likely to cause irreparable harm and have far-reaching consequences for public safety, economic well-being, and the United States’ global leadership.

The federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service, is a vital partner in the weather enterprise, providing critical weather and climate information that helps keep the people of the United States informed, prepared, and safe. NOAA also provides crucial foundational support for the enterprise. This support includes collecting scientific observations and conducting scientific research, developing and improving weather and climate models, and the provision of public services such as weather forecasts and warnings, fisheries management, and marine protection. These products and services are freely accessible to all people, businesses, NGOs, and academic institutions. Other federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), also provide foundational observations, scientific understanding, computational resources, and services for the enterprise.

Private businesses and NGOs use this foundation of science and services to create innovative, value-added products for their clients. Universities rely on NOAA data and models to advance knowledge and train the workforce of the future. As a result of these collaborative partnerships throughout the enterprise, the American people are safer, healthier, and more prosperous.

This unique private-public partnership didn’t happen by accident but by design and through persistent effort. Roles and responsibilities of private businesses, universities, the federal government, and NGOs in the enterprise have developed and adapted over decades to provide timely weather forecasts and information that protect people, improve livelihoods, save money, and add tremendous economic value to our nation.

To ensure the continued success of the enterprise and the American people who depend upon it, the AMS urges strong support for NOAA and the other federal science agencies and extreme caution in altering federal roles and responsibilities within the weather enterprise.

  1. Lazo, J. 2024: Communicating Forecast Uncertainty (CoFU) 2: Replication and Extension of a Survey of the US Public’s Sources, Perceptions, Uses, and Values for Weather Information. An AMS Policy Program Study. The American Meteorological Society, Washington, D.C. https://doi.org/10.1175/cofu2-2024 ↩︎

A Sustainable Investment in Sustainability

by William Hooke, AMS Policy Program Director, from the AMS project, Living on the Real World
Early in the AMS annual meeting this past week, I happened to run into Tim Killeen, the NSF Assistant Director for Geosciences. He barely said hello before asking me, “Bill, have you heard about SEES?”
I hesitated, and we both agreed I’d flunked his test. “SEES,” he went on, “stands for Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability.” He added, “This investment area spans all the NSF directorates, and will amount to about ten percent of our budget. It ought to be the topic of conversation here at the Annual Meeting, and yet there’s virtually nothing about it anywhere in the conferences and the sessions.”
!!!! Ten percent of NSF’s annual budget – some $7B/year – is real money.
Thankfully, Tim graciously went on to let AMS and me off the hook. “We could have done more to publicize this at the NSF,” he said. “But please let people know about the dear colleague letter which is still on our NSF website.”
The letter merits careful reading in its entirety, but here’s an excerpt:
“The SEES Portfolio will support research and education projects that span all eleven NSF Directorates and Offices, including:

  • research at the energy-environment-society nexus
  • novel energy production, harvesting, storage, transmission, and distribution technologies, and their intelligent control that minimizes environmental impact and corresponding adoption, socioeconomic, and policy issues
  • innovative computational science and engineering methods and systems for monitoring, understanding and optimizing life-cycle energy costs and carbon footprints of natural, social and built systems (including IT systems themselves)
  • data analysis, modeling, simulation, visualization, and intelligent decision-making facilitated by advanced computation to understand impacts of climate change and to analyze mitigation strategies
  • study of societal factors such as vulnerability and resilience, and sensitivity to regional change
  • short and long term research enabled by a new generation of experimental and observational networks
  • support for interdisciplinary education/learning science research, development, and professional capacity-building related to sustainability science and engineering
  • creation of research and education partnerships around forefront developments in sustainability science and engineering, both nationally and internationally
  • development of the workforce required to understand the complexities of environmental, energy, and societal sustainability
  • engaging the public to understand issues in sustainability and energy
  • development of the cyberinfrastructure and research instrumentation needed to enable sustainability science and engineering
  • support of the physical, cyber, and human infrastructure necessary to achieve SEES goals”

Probably you’d agree that it would be harder to prove that your work, whatever it is, doesn’t fit under this umbrella, than that it does. And that said, it’s quite probable that many of you have already responded to requests-for-proposals under these auspices. [In fact, that may well be true of the American Meteorological Society also; in my conversation with Tim, I just wasn’t quite quick enough to connect the dots.…]
We can make a forecast. This articulation of a sustainability investment area won’t prove to be a one-off. More likely, it signals the start, or next step, in a series, doesn’t it? Increasingly, as society grows more concerned about the Earth as resource, victim, and threat, we’re going to see further calls for research proposals in these areas and along these lines. We can and should thank Tim and other NSF leadership for their vision here.