Paul-Alexander Lejas

In September 1989, Jeff Masters, meteorologist and contributing Yale Climate Connections weather reporter, flew a small passenger plane into the eye of a category five hurricane. 

Masters, along with a group of pilots and researchers, chased hurricanes to better predict their occurrences. The target that time? Hurricane Hugo which caused 49 deaths and $7 billion in damage.

The mission nearly ended in disaster, but the daring flight was essential in collecting data on wind speeds and direction to monitor the storm’s movement. The program was run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. 

Yet, under the second Trump administration, NOAA’s future remains uncertain, threatening atmospheric and climate researchers at Yale and beyond. In February, roughly 800 probationary NOAA employees were notified about their termination.

“A golden age of weather and climate science in the U.S. has now ended, and we are entering a time of much diminished capability that will cost society billions in avoidable damage and many lives lost,” Masters said.

A timeline of the layoffs

The department, which is already understaffed, aims to protect millions against weather extremes by researching and providing accurate models that predict the onslaught of hurricanes, tropical storms and tornadoes.

According to Masters, the loss of workers across the NOAA has resulted in decreased quality of data collection, which has degraded forecasts.

“Data from weather balloons and aircraft are the two most important ingredients for accurate forecasts,” Masters told the News.

Currently, 15 of 83 U.S. balloon sites are doing partial or no launches. Because of staffing cuts, 12 of the remaining stations are compromised: three stations are doing no launches at all, and nine are doing only 50 percent of launches. 

Even more severe cuts to NOAA are coming, perhaps as soon as next week.

Masters cited Project 2025, a blueprint he said the Trump administration is following. 

The project describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry” that is “harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

Masters estimated that 33 percent of OAR’s $675 million 2024 budget was devoted to climate change research. OAR’s other major funding went to two other programs focused on Ocean, Coastal and Great Lakes Research, and Weather and Air Chemistry Research.

“Since NOAA funding is typically segmented such that its various in-line offices receive their own pot of money, it would be relatively easy for the government to significantly slash funding for OAR and devastate NOAA climate research,” Masters wrote to the News.

Loss of research funding

Elizabeth Yankovsky, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences, has studied large-scale ocean dynamics and turbulence at Princeton University for her doctorate. Her work was predominantly funded by NOAA.

In early April, the Department of Commerce terminated $4 million in awards to Princeton. The press release cited three reasons for the end, including “exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”

“That would have been me, two years back,” Yankovsky said. “This is quite frustrating because climate science is being targeted as perpetuating anxiety and being unreasonable.”

Yankovsky mentioned Syukuro Manabe, who won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased temperatures at the surface of the Earth.

Manabe’s research, conducted at Princeton with the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, GFDL, was the first to reliably predict global warming. Without the NOAA funding, his research would not have been possible.

“There is consensus in the scientific community that his research is valid and important. Without his research, we would not know that the greenhouse effect was increasing due to human activity,” Yankovsky said.

John Wettlaufer, a professor of geophysics, mathematics and physics, sat on the Nobel Prize in Physics committee that chose Manabe.

According to Wettlaufer, there are two major climate modeling centers in the U.S. — the GFDL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. These labs provide both the practical and intellectual power required to conduct the broad range of research conducted in both the U.S. and globally in the form of computing code and researchers.

For a study on jet streams, Wettlaufer was able to download code and documentation from the GFDL; he says that, given the uncertainty within the NOAA, the same approach would have to be duplicated by every investigator, resulting in a great cost in time and money.

“Cuts at such centers have ripple effects through a huge community,” Wettlaufer said. “I am particularly concerned about the young people fired because they provide the intellectual glue between the seasoned senior scientists’ expertise and the practical development of future generations of these models.”

Ruth Blake, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences, works in deep ocean exploration and discovery, related to NOAA’s vessels, Okeanos Explorer and the Exploration Vessel Nautilus.

Blake says that recent cuts to NOAA may limit or eliminate the ability of Okeanos to inspire through public outreach activities.

“It will be a truly great loss not only to ocean scientists, but to society at large,” Blake said.

Okeanos maintains a telepresence, live-streaming of the ocean and seafloor, which plays a vital role in scientific outreach. Website visitors can toggle between different cameras, potentially getting the opportunity to observe curiously rare deep-sea organisms that they would otherwise be unable to see.

History is repeating itself, scientists say

Researchers the News spoke to find the government’s involvement in stirring public mistrust in science anachronistic.

“It’s like saying Einstein’s research or the Crick and Watson discovery of the DNA double helix is research that we shouldn’t be doing at all, just because the administration has an opinion,” Yankovsky said.

Regardless, given the instability of careers in planetary sciences, Yankovsky says she isn’t surprised if prospective climate scientists still in school decide to pivot careers. Industry or other independently funded careers outside of academia are gaining some popularity.

Wettlaufer, who co-teaches a course with Yankovsky on understanding how climate works, said the federal decisions are “destroying” entities that influence the environment and health of the inhabitants of the U.S. and the world.

“None of these people who call global warming a hoax, would call bypass surgery or taking statins to control their cholesterol, like Trump does, a hoax, which is akin to calling life a hoax,” Wettlaufer told the News.

After his time as a Hurricane Hunter, Masters has remained heavily involved with climate sciences. Since 2005, he has been writing one of “the Internet’s most popular weather and climate change blogs”: Weather Underground.

Masters likened the current state of U.S. academia to China during the Cultural Revolution, when professors were driven from their positions in education. Since the start of the Trump’s second term, there has been a “large exodus of smart and talented people leaving academia in the U.S,” Masters said.

“Even if funding to weather and climate science is restored, it won’t be easy to get back to where we were–it’s like blowing up a dam,” said Masters. “You can’t glue the pieces back together to get it back, you have to painstakingly recreate the whole infrastructure at great time and expense.” 

The NOAA was founded in October 1970.