How's the weather? It's up in the air
Local weather forecasts not immune to federal DOGE cuts
Agriculture is the economic backbone of Sonoma County, so folks around here—farmers especially—pay close attention to the weather. The weather locally has been ideal over the last week, but the political winds in Washington are more worrisome.
Last week, the Trump Administration eliminated 1,300 staffers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS), including some western states regional NOAA staff, according to a recent Associated Press (AP) report. Over the weekend, another 1,000 NOAA employees received layoff notices.
The problem is most of the weather data that people in Sebastopol and Sonoma County depend on relies on the work being done every day by the NOAA and NWS. Think of having days ahead without official frost or flood alerts, gaps in the ability for PG&E to warn its customers about high winds and fire danger or the absence of winter warnings for local homeless people to seek emergency shelter. And then there’s the Westamerica Bank “time and temperature” sign in downtown Sebastopol, faithfully flashing the local temperature 24 hours of every day.
If proposed budget cuts by the Trump Administration in Washington, D.C. are enacted, almost all local weather services—like the bank’s temperature digits—could vanish.
“It’s very much up in the air,” said Kai Tawa, a meteorologist for Chico-based Western Weather that provides daily forecasts for the Sonoma County Winegrowers and other local farmers. “We haven’t been given any directives, so we’re just standing by.”
Anywhere you see a temperature or a weather forecast posted, the original data can be traced to a federal NWS satellite, weather balloon, terrestrial weather station or ocean buoy. This includes the weather app on your smartphone to the morning newspaper and evening TV forecasts.
Locally, public agencies including Sonoma Water, the Charles Schulz county airport, dozens of fire and first responder personnel and weather historians all rely on the daily NWS data. Cal Fire’s Red Flag alerts are all based on NWS weather forecasts, too.
“We have a critical intersection (with NWS),” said Stuart Tiffen, a spokesperson for Sonoma Water, a county agency, that tracks Russian River flood and drought conditions, which are offered free to the general public.
The Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) being helmed by billionaire Elon Musk has a target of eliminating 20 percent of all NOAA workers and the closure of as many as half of NOAA’s regional offices and field stations. Project 2025, a Republican and conservative political manifesto being followed by the Trump Administration, calls for NOAA to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”
Project 2025 and Musk are calling for the “full commercialization” of National Weather Service. Private weather forecasting is a multi-billion dollar industry, but leaders of that industry, including Accuweather’s CEO Steven Smith has warned that the private companies “could not replace everything (that) NOAA does.”
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA, has called the NOAA job cuts “spectacularly short-sighted” and will “ultimately deal a major self-inflicted wound to public safety.” North Coast congressman Jared Huffman, ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee in Congress, has called for an investigation into the firings of “hundreds of scientists and experts at NOAA.”
Nearly all public and private weather forecast services are based on the Global Forecast System (GFS), which is a mathematical model run four times each day by National Weather Service meteorologists. The model is based on data collected from 18 NWS satellites and thousands of regional field station monitors that is fed into banks of NWS supercomputers. The data and reports are public domain and free to everyone. This is the same information that The Weather Channel, Weather Underground and weather.com broadcast and share for a fee or paid subscription.
“We use the GFS everyday,” said Tawa. “If we lost those resources, we’d lose our accuracy and timeliness.” Western Weather contracts with the Sonoma County Winegrowers with a network of 57 field stations located in local vineyards and adjacent locations. The equipment is privately owned, but the collected data is made available by Western Weather to area farmers by annual subscriptions. “It’s a great public-private partnership,” said Tawa. “We get the NOAA services with no strings attached.”
The Winegrowers weather stations record daily high and low temperatures, mildew points, frost alerts and daily total rainfall or precipitation. The network covers the many micro-climates of Sonoma County that are known worldwide for their influence and growing conditions for premium wines.
Much of the work at Sonoma Water is focused on the weather across the vast Russian River watershed that extends from north of Ukiah to the Pacific Coast and the mouth of the river at Jenner. Sonoma Water is a partner with several other public agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Advanced Quantitative Precipitation Information (AQPI.) The forecast services are coordinated under a contract with NOAA. The AQPI is designed to provide emergency information about floods, droughts and other dynamic weather conditions. The partnership also records trends and data to map ongoing climate change factors.
Sonoma Water also receives flood forecasting and reservoir monitoring support from NOAA and its California-Nevada River Forecast Center (CNRFC). “We use the Center to provide up-to-date information and for our emergency hotline,” said Tiffen.
PG&E Chief Meteorologist Scott Strenfel said the private utility has been expanding its weather-forecasting technology and is using machine learning and artificial intelligence models to reduce its reliance on NWS services. “We use a network of nearly 1,600 weather stations and have installed 50 new locations in 2024,” Strenfel said. “This allows us to predict wind speed, gust and temperature forecasts over the next five days.” Strenfel and another PG&E media spokesperson declined to comment on potential future NOAA budget cuts.
The National Weather Service and U.S. Coast Guard also operate an important weather station at Bodega Bay that serves the local commercial fishing fleet and recreational boaters. It monitors ocean currents and other sea conditions and coastal weather by a radio connection to NWS Ocean Buoy #46013 and orbiting satellites. The regional NWS office is San Francisco Bay Area/Monterey. It also operates the NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards (NWR) at 162.550 MHz.
The oldest NWS cooperative weather station west of the Mississippi River is located in Graton at the Hallberg Butterfly Gardens. The station was established by Alfred Hallberg in 1900, 30 years after the founding of the National Weather Service in 1870. Louise Hallberg, daughter of Alfred, was awarded the Thomas Jefferson NWS Cooperative Weather Observer Award in 1998. Hallberg kept local weather records until her death in 2017 at the age of 100. The weather station is still in operation but has since been automated.
There have been enormous changes in weather prediction since 1870. Thanks to satellite and other data, meteorology has become more a science and less of an art. But for now, all we know is that the National Weather Service and the NOAA are in for some rough weather. We’ll see what, if anything, is left after the storm.
This week’s weather from the National Weather Service
 | A guest post by
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Weather forecasts are what economists call a ‘public good’. The value to the public will always be greater than what the private sector can charge. Sure larger firms may be able to pay for private forecasts (many already do), but what about the people in the Russian River watershed? Public goods are always underproduced by the private sector and thus become the legitimate role for government.
NOAA was targeted because of its role in collecting data that verified climate change and that is a story the Administration and fossil fuel interests want to squash. There is nothing about this that is about efficiency and everything about this is about an emerging authoritarian Administration wanting to control what we know and what is reported. It is part of a broad based attack on science that will cost us dearly now and in the future as we lose the race to other countries who are not afraid of what science tells us.
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