> The National Weather Service Employees Organization, its labor union, said the lack of staff is taking a toll on forecasting operations and that the agency is “for the first time in its history teetering on the brink of failure.” Managers are being forced to scale back certain operations, and staff are stressed and overworked.
> “It’s gotten so bad that we’re not going to be able to provide service that two years ago we were able to provide to public, emergency managers and media,” said Dan Sobien, the president of the union. “We’ve never been in that position before.”
It makes me deeply discouraged that something so vital to life in general is almost impossible to keep staffed (mostly because of a lack of funds), yet the military's budget increased by $54 Billion this year — to a total of $639 Billion for FY2018.
Both are correct. Funding is not the issue, but the Trump order did exacerbate the issue, as well as the lack of nominating key positions in NOAA and NWS.
> An independent report from the Government Accountability Office showed staff vacancies increased 57 percent from 2014 to 2016. The overall vacancy rate reached 11 percent or 455 positions at the end of 2016 up from just 5 percent (211 positions) at the end of 2010, the report said.
“The Weather Service has faced different obstacles in trying to fill positions, including the 2013 budget sequester, related hiring freezes, and changes in administrations. In 2012, challenged to find funding to compensate its workers, it was embroiled in a “reprogramming” scandal, in which it moved around funds to cover payroll, without congressional approval.”
That's the pattern you'll find in many government agencies — they might in aggregate have the money available but it's hard to spend on the right things or there are policy changes needed for quality of life improvements which cause people to leave. People outside might not have appreciated that the sequester lead to things like mandatory furloughs — i.e. your boss telling you to pick the day you're going to stay home and not get paid, even if you need the money and have work to get done — which were really bad for morale.
Traditionally job security was one thing which lead people to endure some of those problems but that's been under attack for awhile and you had recent things like congress considering cutting retirement, all of which aren't going to be great for getting people to take jobs:
I know someone who worked on a big navy project which almost had a (IIRC) multi-year delay because even though it was almost certain to be funded, they couldn’t legally commit money on a contract with a shipyard and missing that deadline would mean the facility would be booked by someone else.
Those kinds of hit to long-term planning really crank up the stress and costs.
In federal government budgeting dollars are allocated for specific programs or services.
You might have a program, say climate change, that the administration doesn’t like because politics and refuses to perform work in, despite the wishes of Congress.
You may have other programs like forecasting that have no money allocated at all.
This is mismanagement by design. The GOP types want to outsource the NWS function and have been trying to do so for many years through the budget process. The senator from Pennsylvania tried to prohibit free release of weather data to make some rain for Accuweather, which is a PA company.
Well if the NWS hadn't screwed the decision for prime on awips2 so badly they might have some of my sympathy. Bad decisions end up biting everyone down the road.
Why is the headline here missing "labor union says"
The actual Weather Service seems to think they are doing just fine.
“Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
Headlines are limited to 80 characters here. The full headline was too long and I was not allowed to post it. I cut off the end, as it was present in bold at the top of the page after clicking, and seemed the only way to acceptably shorten the title so that it could be discussed here.
That eliminates the main reason for the article to have been written, causes the reader to wonder if the NWS was just bombed with a nuke or something, and is absolutely clickbait. I stand by my headline change.
So ... highlighting that this "brink of failure" is a staffing problem isn't as important as pointing out that the labor union is the one making the statement? Ok then...
Why did your quote ignore the context of that quote?
> Whether the cutbacks will affect the quality of forecasts and warnings, “I can’t say for certain,” Martin said. “You’re working people double shifts, some people aren’t getting days off, and you’re grinding people down. There is that potential [to affect the forecast quality]. The longer this goes on, the more the potential rises. It’s a long winter ahead.”
> The Burlington Free-Press reported similar circumstances at the forecast office serving its region. “Given our staffing, our ability to fill our mission of protecting life and property would be nearly impossible if we had a big storm,” Brooke Taber, a Weather Service forecaster and union steward, told the paper.
> Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, pushed back on any notion the organization is neglecting obligations to constituents and the health of its staff. “Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
Well, it is the labor union representing the workers stating it. It's clear in the article and from the context.
Omitting that from the title doesn't really detract from message. I get what you're saying, but it's not propaganda, and the NWS isn't even saying they aren't understaffed (with the quote you offered as proof that they disagreed).
They are saying they aren't putting their staff in dangerous situations, which is clearly being disputed by the staff and their union. They aren't saying being understaffed is fine.
> While the “ceiling” for the total number of positions is 4,890 per the National Weather Service Table of Organization, the official said the number of positions is 4,453 people under the 2017 fiscal year appropriations act. “We believe this level is adequate to achieve National Weather Service core functions,” the official said.
I would've recommended starting with this quote, then, if that's the point you were trying to make.
But still, "adequate to achieve core functions" isn't the same as "just fine".
> The vacancy situation has not gone unnoticed by Congress. In its 2018 fiscal year budget markup for the Weather Service, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote that the “extended vacancies are unacceptable — particularly when the Committee has provided more than adequate resources and direction to fill vacancies expeditiously for the past several years.”
It looks like Congress agrees that the Weather Service is understaffed.
> Martin said staff morale is in the tank. “Some people have been denied vacations, because there are not enough bodies to fill shifts,” he said. “I, myself, worked a 15-hour day about a week ago. You get a lot less sleep. You start to wonder if you’re safe on the road. You don’t see your loved ones, which eats into family life.”
If this is even remotely true, it definitely seems they're understaffed despite the statement from the Weather Service. Of course the Weather Service would put out a statement they're doing fine. I see no reason as to why we should take their word for it over the word of Congressional committees and actual employees.
"the National Weather Service had 216 vacant positions it could not fill due to a governmentwide hiring freeze imposed by the Trump administration, according to a recently released document."https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-ene...
"The Weather Service’s head count finally stabilized in 2016 [...] But the staffing dip resumed in 2017, falling from 3,425 in December to 3,368 in August,"
"Staffing had declined so much that the Government Accountability Office wrote in May that employees were challenged in their ability “to complete key tasks.”"
"“There's no question that the hiring freeze had an effect,” said Dan Sobien, NWSEO president. “But really it was the straw that broke the camel's back.” He added, “The camel was already weighed down to the ground.”
"The National Hurricane Center, a Weather Service division, has been led by an acting director since May. An acting career official is heading NOAA until President Trump nominates and the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. Trump has waited longer than any other president to fill that role."
"In either case, the vacancies at the Weather Service were numerous enough, even before Trump was inaugurated, for the GAO to audit the agency's hiring practices."
"In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote in a report that lawmakers are “very concerned with the continued number of employee vacancies” even though Congress has provided enough money to fill them."
The slow, subtle erosion of our public agencies that don't contribute to the military industrial complex and/or the energy sector is really disheartening.
Yes, very much so. Computer models are not forecasts, and it would be a terrible state of affairs if we did not have human forecasters to make forecasts.
Why are computer models not forecasts? Why would it be a terrible state of affairs not to have human forecasters?
More specifically, what role do humans play in digesting the output of the computer model and producing the forecast? What adjustments or corrections are made to what the model says is going to happen, and based on what reasoning? "My gut tells me the tornado is going to move east, even though the computer says it will move west with an estimated 98% likelihood"?
Are the humans doing more than creating a human-consumable verbal summary of what the computer model says will happen -- explaining the severity and location of the predicted weather in human terms?
Computer models certainly produce forecasts, but humans are needed to interpret these forecasts.
At each National Weather Service office, forecasters typically use model output to guide their daily forecast products, such as temperatures and precipitation probabilities. However, these forecasters are aware of smaller-scale nuances of their forecast area, such as topographic influences, land-sea interactions or urban heat island effects, which models may struggle to resolve. Human knowledge of model limitations helps to produce a better forecast.
I spent awhile as a weather forecaster in the USAF. I got a strong impression the weather squadron's purpose had nothing to do with predicting weather, and everything to do with providing an additional scapegoat when things go wrong.
Wonder where The Weather Company fits in here- after all, they seem to have no trouble hiring at a rapid clip- I assume most people get their weather from the Weather Company but I live in Atlanta where it's located so it's a given here.
I'm guessing the private sector pay is better, wouldn't be surprised if they were poaching NWS employees.
They don't run all of it. Many city news channels have their own radar and forecast teams. That's not to say I don't think the NWS is an essential government function.
If you go to the USAJOBS site and search for National Weather Service, you get about 270 results. If you then limit that to jobs that are open to the public, you get just under a hundred jobs. So, I think both sides are telling A truth.
The NWS says there are around 270 open positions. That is demonstrably true.
The union is saying there are about 700 open positions. They might think there are vacancies for which requisitions have not yet been made.
Perhaps, therein lies the discrepancy. And it speaks to the rest of the odd financing and accounting discussed in the article.
Are union jobs like that really all open to the public on sites like USAJOBS? I was just reading an article about how many them are handed out through connections to other union members, it's usually the same group of tight-knight union workers on every public works project.
So there's an agency that provides oversight that makes sure that the jobs were handed out to people who applied through USAJOBS and verifies they were available to the general public? It's not the same few private companies getting the same jobs every time and handing out union cards to a small group of tight-knit people? Typically family and friends of the original group? And they don't limit each hire to a narrow specific role defined in the RFP so they can hire more people for a job that a single multi-talented person can do?
That's good. I wouldn't want that to be the case like in other industries with artificial scarcity and special power structures.
There are many positions that are in effect only for those already in the employ of the contract. Either lateral or promotion but only for an 'insider'. This is not particular to this single contract but can be applicable for all contracts depending on many factors.
Given that government employees -- not to mention political appointees in transitory leadership positions -- are increasingly enjoined, mandated, and coerced to tow the party line (of the party in power), I'd pay a fair amount of attention to what the employees' union has to say about the matter. A voice with substantial political clout of its own, as well as some "anonym-ization" from individual comments subject to punishment including career termination.
There is separate reporting to the effect of staff becoming extremely stretched and overworked with the combination of hurricanes and fires that recently hit.
There are the reported proposed cuts to NOAA/NCAR budgets of 15+%. Cuts threatening to cripple current data collection efforts and ongoing innovation and developments in same. At a time when year-upon-year environmental and weather circumstances make increasingly clear that we need a better and more detailed understanding of what is going on (and of how we might deal with it).
U.S. Government weather services provide the backbone upon which private, commercial forecasting builds -- when they are not simply repackaging and repeating the government-provided information.
Those services are also critical to the ongoing management and execution of many commercial sectors within the U.S. economy. Agriculture, shipping, transport, even the "dirty old fossil fuel" sectors. Forecasting was wrong one one of our recent winters experiencing extreme cold spells particularly east of the Rocky Mountains, and propane supplies that had not been bolstered ran extremely low, leading to dramatic price hikes and shortages and considerable economic distress downstream not just to households but to businesses, i.e. other productive sectors.
These services are vital to a planful, productive execution of our economy.
But, as in many cases, the "government is bad" people refuse to acknowledge this.
Look at the EPA. Those folks now can't speak publicly without "official sign-off" of a political leadership. Politics before science.
Where present, set your sentiments about "unions" aside and look at why this may be the primary or only route via which you are hearing about problems, from the people in these institutions.
P.S. I forgot to mention: While I have mixed feelings about over-doing the "soft skills" aspects of the following, part of the head-count concern right now includes expanding efforts to translate data into communication that will make people take pro-active action to minimize their own risks. For a burgeoning emergency, making it clearer where may flood and what that will look like, so that, for example, people evacuate before they are stranded and at imminent physical risk necessitating risky and costly rescue. Reassessing and better communicating environmental risks for specific areas, to spur more pro-active zoning and other regulation as well as individual actions such as seeking flood insurance (before an uninsured person ends up needing a government-funded bail-out).
i live in Woodinville, a suburb of Seattle, and have noticed over the last couple years that the weather forecast is getting really bad. Often (maybe once/month) showing 0% chance of rain when it's actually pouring rain. The temperature forecast also seems suspect, but I don't own a thermometer so can't provide numbers there.
60 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 68.8 ms ] thread> “It’s gotten so bad that we’re not going to be able to provide service that two years ago we were able to provide to public, emergency managers and media,” said Dan Sobien, the president of the union. “We’ve never been in that position before.”
It makes me deeply discouraged that something so vital to life in general is almost impossible to keep staffed (mostly because of a lack of funds), yet the military's budget increased by $54 Billion this year — to a total of $639 Billion for FY2018.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
This is all pre-Trump
> An independent report from the Government Accountability Office showed staff vacancies increased 57 percent from 2014 to 2016. The overall vacancy rate reached 11 percent or 455 positions at the end of 2016 up from just 5 percent (211 positions) at the end of 2010, the report said.
“The Weather Service has faced different obstacles in trying to fill positions, including the 2013 budget sequester, related hiring freezes, and changes in administrations. In 2012, challenged to find funding to compensate its workers, it was embroiled in a “reprogramming” scandal, in which it moved around funds to cover payroll, without congressional approval.”
That's the pattern you'll find in many government agencies — they might in aggregate have the money available but it's hard to spend on the right things or there are policy changes needed for quality of life improvements which cause people to leave. People outside might not have appreciated that the sequester lead to things like mandatory furloughs — i.e. your boss telling you to pick the day you're going to stay home and not get paid, even if you need the money and have work to get done — which were really bad for morale.
Traditionally job security was one thing which lead people to endure some of those problems but that's been under attack for awhile and you had recent things like congress considering cutting retirement, all of which aren't going to be great for getting people to take jobs:
https://federalnewsradio.com/retirement/2017/10/house-set-to...
Those kinds of hit to long-term planning really crank up the stress and costs.
>National Weather Service Employees Organization
>“The NWS leadership has been incapable of placing their budget priorities correctly,”
> “understaffing is not due to underfunding,”
> “unspent carry-over funds” in the tens of millions of dollars
You might have a program, say climate change, that the administration doesn’t like because politics and refuses to perform work in, despite the wishes of Congress.
You may have other programs like forecasting that have no money allocated at all.
This is mismanagement by design. The GOP types want to outsource the NWS function and have been trying to do so for many years through the budget process. The senator from Pennsylvania tried to prohibit free release of weather data to make some rain for Accuweather, which is a PA company.
The actual Weather Service seems to think they are doing just fine.
“Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
> Whether the cutbacks will affect the quality of forecasts and warnings, “I can’t say for certain,” Martin said. “You’re working people double shifts, some people aren’t getting days off, and you’re grinding people down. There is that potential [to affect the forecast quality]. The longer this goes on, the more the potential rises. It’s a long winter ahead.”
> The Burlington Free-Press reported similar circumstances at the forecast office serving its region. “Given our staffing, our ability to fill our mission of protecting life and property would be nearly impossible if we had a big storm,” Brooke Taber, a Weather Service forecaster and union steward, told the paper.
> Susan Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the National Weather Service, pushed back on any notion the organization is neglecting obligations to constituents and the health of its staff. “Let me state emphatically that we would never take an action that would jeopardize the services we provide to emergency managers and the public,” she said. “NWS is taking definitive steps to ensure the health and well-being of our employees through guidance to local managers on scheduling and flexibility.”
Seems far from "just fine".
(I'd probably side with labor on this issue as well, but the headline is clearly biased)
Omitting that from the title doesn't really detract from message. I get what you're saying, but it's not propaganda, and the NWS isn't even saying they aren't understaffed (with the quote you offered as proof that they disagreed).
They are saying they aren't putting their staff in dangerous situations, which is clearly being disputed by the staff and their union. They aren't saying being understaffed is fine.
I would've recommended starting with this quote, then, if that's the point you were trying to make.
But still, "adequate to achieve core functions" isn't the same as "just fine".
> The vacancy situation has not gone unnoticed by Congress. In its 2018 fiscal year budget markup for the Weather Service, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote that the “extended vacancies are unacceptable — particularly when the Committee has provided more than adequate resources and direction to fill vacancies expeditiously for the past several years.”
It looks like Congress agrees that the Weather Service is understaffed.
> Martin said staff morale is in the tank. “Some people have been denied vacations, because there are not enough bodies to fill shifts,” he said. “I, myself, worked a 15-hour day about a week ago. You get a lot less sleep. You start to wonder if you’re safe on the road. You don’t see your loved ones, which eats into family life.”
If this is even remotely true, it definitely seems they're understaffed despite the statement from the Weather Service. Of course the Weather Service would put out a statement they're doing fine. I see no reason as to why we should take their word for it over the word of Congressional committees and actual employees.
It’s not like they’re an impartial observer in this.
"The Weather Service’s head count finally stabilized in 2016 [...] But the staffing dip resumed in 2017, falling from 3,425 in December to 3,368 in August,"
"Staffing had declined so much that the Government Accountability Office wrote in May that employees were challenged in their ability “to complete key tasks.”"
"“There's no question that the hiring freeze had an effect,” said Dan Sobien, NWSEO president. “But really it was the straw that broke the camel's back.” He added, “The camel was already weighed down to the ground.”
"The National Hurricane Center, a Weather Service division, has been led by an acting director since May. An acting career official is heading NOAA until President Trump nominates and the Senate confirms a permanent replacement. Trump has waited longer than any other president to fill that role."
"In either case, the vacancies at the Weather Service were numerous enough, even before Trump was inaugurated, for the GAO to audit the agency's hiring practices."
"In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee wrote in a report that lawmakers are “very concerned with the continued number of employee vacancies” even though Congress has provided enough money to fill them."
More specifically, what role do humans play in digesting the output of the computer model and producing the forecast? What adjustments or corrections are made to what the model says is going to happen, and based on what reasoning? "My gut tells me the tornado is going to move east, even though the computer says it will move west with an estimated 98% likelihood"?
Are the humans doing more than creating a human-consumable verbal summary of what the computer model says will happen -- explaining the severity and location of the predicted weather in human terms?
At each National Weather Service office, forecasters typically use model output to guide their daily forecast products, such as temperatures and precipitation probabilities. However, these forecasters are aware of smaller-scale nuances of their forecast area, such as topographic influences, land-sea interactions or urban heat island effects, which models may struggle to resolve. Human knowledge of model limitations helps to produce a better forecast.
A further example would be hurricane forecasting, where National Hurricane Center forecasts typically outperform most models (see http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/verification/verify6.shtml for starters).
I'm guessing the private sector pay is better, wouldn't be surprised if they were poaching NWS employees.
They probably run all of it, I'm just not sure if there are any independent ones.
While this is true, it's probably also worth pointing out that those forecasts likely depend on NWS data in some fashion.
Lots of them say something sly about using the only radar network...
They also provide forecasts that your airliner uses to plan safe flights.
The NWS says there are around 270 open positions. That is demonstrably true.
The union is saying there are about 700 open positions. They might think there are vacancies for which requisitions have not yet been made.
Perhaps, therein lies the discrepancy. And it speaks to the rest of the odd financing and accounting discussed in the article.
Government hiring doesn’t work like that. Positions are usually open to everyone (or at least US citizens) or only existing staff.
That's good. I wouldn't want that to be the case like in other industries with artificial scarcity and special power structures.
There is separate reporting to the effect of staff becoming extremely stretched and overworked with the combination of hurricanes and fires that recently hit.
There are the reported proposed cuts to NOAA/NCAR budgets of 15+%. Cuts threatening to cripple current data collection efforts and ongoing innovation and developments in same. At a time when year-upon-year environmental and weather circumstances make increasingly clear that we need a better and more detailed understanding of what is going on (and of how we might deal with it).
U.S. Government weather services provide the backbone upon which private, commercial forecasting builds -- when they are not simply repackaging and repeating the government-provided information.
Those services are also critical to the ongoing management and execution of many commercial sectors within the U.S. economy. Agriculture, shipping, transport, even the "dirty old fossil fuel" sectors. Forecasting was wrong one one of our recent winters experiencing extreme cold spells particularly east of the Rocky Mountains, and propane supplies that had not been bolstered ran extremely low, leading to dramatic price hikes and shortages and considerable economic distress downstream not just to households but to businesses, i.e. other productive sectors.
These services are vital to a planful, productive execution of our economy.
But, as in many cases, the "government is bad" people refuse to acknowledge this.
Look at the EPA. Those folks now can't speak publicly without "official sign-off" of a political leadership. Politics before science.
Where present, set your sentiments about "unions" aside and look at why this may be the primary or only route via which you are hearing about problems, from the people in these institutions.
P.S. I forgot to mention: While I have mixed feelings about over-doing the "soft skills" aspects of the following, part of the head-count concern right now includes expanding efforts to translate data into communication that will make people take pro-active action to minimize their own risks. For a burgeoning emergency, making it clearer where may flood and what that will look like, so that, for example, people evacuate before they are stranded and at imminent physical risk necessitating risky and costly rescue. Reassessing and better communicating environmental risks for specific areas, to spur more pro-active zoning and other regulation as well as individual actions such as seeking flood insurance (before an uninsured person ends up needing a government-funded bail-out).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
(Still learning my native tongue at age 52.)
I also seem to be making more keying mistakes in my comments, recently. "that" as opposed to "than", for example, IIRC from another recent comment.
Maybe be a medication I started a couple of months ago...