We've got rain and scattered thunderstorms swinging through the Midwest and Northeast this week, but summer-like weather takes hold for the weekend. Outside of the Northwest, temps will be running above average — just keep an eye out for storms in the forecast for the Central US. —Angela Fritz, Meteorologist

From Andrew Freedman

NWS meteorologist Ryan Husted monitors weather patterns at the NWS Nashville forecast office on July 15, 2025. (Mark Zaleski/The Tennessean/USAToday Network/Imagn Images). 

With the hurricane season fast approaching, the National Weather Service faces deepening challenges. These include understaffing, burnout, an aging radar network and IT infrastructure and a sweeping reorganization plan that is unsettling the workforce. 

There is concern among some current and former NWS employees that the agency may not be fully up to the task of protecting life and property in the face of extreme weather events, some of which are becoming more likely and intense due to global warming.  

The inner workings of this agency may seem remote at first, but what happens at the NWS and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, affects a constellation of weather forecasting and research entities.  

To put it plainly, a less reliable NWS would have ripple effects down to the level of your favorite weather app. 

First, there is a persistent workforce issue. The NWS lost about 560 people in DOGE-related cuts last year, and additional members of its highly specialized workforce have since departed for other reasons, contributing to a relatively high attrition rate. Last summer, the Trump administration allowed it to hire again despite the imposition of a federal hiring freeze.  

That exemption will expire in September, according to a NOAA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal.  

Until then, the agency is rushing to hire forecasters, electronic technicians and other staff (and has issued about 280 job offers so far), but it won't come close to having the 4,000 person-plus headcount that it did prior to the second Trump administration.

The reality is that it will take years to recover from the personnel cuts made in 2025, which included the loss of both NWS's newest and its most experienced forecasters to firings and DOGE-related incentives for federal workers to leave the government.

The lost expertise is what worries current and former employees the most, said Alan Gerard, a longtime NWS meteorologist who now runs a private weather consulting business and writes a popular weather Substack newsletter.  

“So much experience was lost in the last 18 months,” Gerard said. “I don't think that we should underestimate that or lose sight of that, even as the Weather Service is trying to start hiring.”  

The absence of adequate staffing has also deprived forecasters of some of the observations that they rely on to make their predictions. For months, some locations that typically release weather balloons twice daily, in the early morning and late afternoon, were missing one or both launches due to a lack of personnel.  

Gaps in the balloon launches may contribute to forecast errors since these balloons carry instruments to send data back to models — which can be especially critical in severe thunderstorm situations. 

The NOAA official said all upper air stations are now back to launching balloons twice a day, but the launch timing in some places has shifted from early morning to midday, when more meteorologists are on duty. 

Some meteorologists have questioned whether the shift in timing has affected forecast accuracy after at least two high-profile forecast busts during the past few months. 

Meteorologist Brett Albright releases a weather balloon in Peachtree City, Georgia. (CNN)

In parts of Kansas on April 13, a tornado watch was issued with less than an hour of lead time before the first twister touched down in an area that was not outlooked for severe weather that day. And in Michigan on March 6, a tornado struck with no watch in effect at the time.

Tornado warnings were issued for those twisters, but watches are meant to put the public and emergency management officials on notice that conditions are favorable for severe weather.

The NOAA official said the effect of the shift in balloon launch timing is being evaluated by the agency’s computer modeling experts, and an agency spokesperson said accuracy has not suffered. 

"Our observing system is incredibly resilient with many redundancies, and we continue to expand our observational network by including more observations from the commercial sector," said NWS spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei.

She also said the agency has seen "no evidence of degradation" in its weather models. 

Beyond the staffing and weather balloon issues, the NWS is also saddled with an aging Doppler radar network and outdated forecasting software that suffers from frequent outages, forcing forecasters to devise workarounds. A replacement for the current radar network, which dates to the 1980s and 1990s, is nowhere in sight. And some of the agency’s IT and communications issues are hardware-related and won’t be fixed by moving it to the cloud, as NWS intends to do. 

For example, during a late March severe weather event, the NWS’ Wilmington, Ohio office lost communications for several hours, forcing the meteorologists in the Cleveland office to issue warnings for them while dealing with their own severe weather outbreak, Gerard said.  

Then there is a matter of the reorganization. The agency is moving to a demand-based staffing model, with greater staffing being devoted to busier offices that handle large populations.  

Previously, each forecast office had been staffed in more or less the same cookie cutter manner, which has contributed to burnout at the busiest locations.  

That change in staffing philosophy, which will play out over the next few years, has proven to be a difficult transition to explain, with rumors spreading among staff at the far-flung agency, the official said. 

The bottom line, however, is that the agency’s forecasts and warnings are still performing well, partly because its workforce is so dedicated to their mission.  

“It’s not like the forecasts have just fallen off a cliff,” Gerard said in cautioning people against concluding that NWS' forecasts and severe alerts are untrustworthy.  

The stunning colors on this cloud aren't a rainbow, but a rare phenomenon. Take a look.