He flew into the eye of Hurricane Helene and helped improve forecasts. Then Trump fired him

[ResidentialBusiness]

Last September, as Hurricane Helene barreled toward the coast of Florida, Andrew Hazelton was in a plane flying into the eye of the storm. The plane was collecting crucial data to help understand the path and intensity of the hurricane—and Hazelton was simultaneously watching to see how the real-time data matched what scientific models predicted.

At the time, he was working at a NOAA lab at the University of Miami; in October, he was promoted to another NOAA job focused on helping the government’s computer models of hurricanes continue to get even better. (NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is in charge of tracking, predicting, and responding to hurricanes, among many other things, from deep sea exploration to climate research.) At the end of February, Hazelton became one of hundreds of NOAA employees to lose his job through cuts pushed by DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

The team was already short-staffed, Hazelton says. Now it will be even harder to do the work. “They’re going to do their best to try to continue the mission—NOAA is very mission-focused on protecting laws and property. That’s what we want to do. But when you lose expertise, you lose people. Any one person can only do so much during the day. So fewer tests will get run, and there will be less expertise to make improvements. And it’ll degrade the forecast over time.”

Andrew Hazelton

As hurricane forecasts improve, that translates directly into saving lives. When Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992, causing around $27 billion in damage, most forecasts could happen only a day or two in advance of a hurricane. Now, forecasts five days in advance can be as accurate.

“That has a lot of implications,” Hazelton says. “That means that the forecast ‘cone’ that people see is smaller. People who are under harm’s way can get out sooner and prepare better. But it also means that people who aren’t going to be as directly affected don’t have to close their business or close their school.”

The modeling is on track to eventually provide accurate forecasts seven days in advance. That’s because of the work of scientists like Hazelton, who has a PhD in meteorology, and was part of the team helping the models continually improve. Though he was fired because he was a “probationary” employee—meaning that he’d been in his current role for less than a year—he had already been working in NOAA labs at universities for nearly a decade.

Most probationary employees were in a similar position, he says, and had been working with NOAA at universities or as contractors for years, even if they were relatively early in their careers. “You’re losing people who are motivated to improve themselves and build their career, build your organization, hungry, all of those things—but also have that experience,” he says. “You’re not getting rid of people who haven’t really done anything.”

NOAA is expected to potentially fire more than 1,000 additional employees. In total, that would mean losing around 15% of its staff. As a result, the U.S. will have less information about the weather at a time when climate change is making it more extreme. Hurricanes, for example, come with stronger winds, higher storm surges, and more rainfall as the planet heats up.

“The lack of data is going to degrade the forecast—for all sorts of weather,” Hazelton says. “So these improvements that we’ve become accustomed to are going to be harder and harder to come by. It’s possible we could even see the forecast get worse again. That would result in more deaths and loss of property and loss of life.”

The forecast improvements that we’ve come to take for granted, he says, have been the result of investments over decades. And those investments were already efficient: NOAA’s improvements in hurricane forecasting have saved an estimated $7 billion since 2009, or 20 times as much as the agency spent on its forecasting system

Though the current administration has a vision of privatizing weather data, it’s worth noting that private weather companies rely heavily on sources from NOAA—a system that can’t easily be replaced. “This basic forecast and lifesaving data—watches and warnings—is something I don’t think the private sector can really replicate,” Hazelton says. “At least not easily.”

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