Got a heads up on this from a senior scientist who emailed today:
“If this happens, weather forecasting as we know it will end.”
Further underlined by Daniel Swain, well known to readers here.
The Trump administration has informed NOAA that two pivotal centers for weather forecastingwill soon have their leases canceled, sources told Axios.
Why it matters: One of the buildings is the nerve center for generating national weather forecasts.
- It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency. It houses telecommunications equipment to send weather data and forecasts across the U.S. and abroad.
Driving the news: The NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction is on the lease cancellation list, according to a NOAA employee who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.
- Two ex-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials also confirmed the list.
- The building houses the National Weather Service’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, or NCEP, which includes the Environmental Modeling Center. It opened in 2012and has about 268,000 square feet of space.
- The modeling center runs the computer models used in day-to-day weather forecasting, and ensures that weather data correctly goes into these models and that they are operating correctly.
The lease cancellation was first reported by The Verge. The National Weather Service didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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9 Comments
jauntywundrkind
Another absolutely horrific act of sabotage making the whole world worse for no particular reason.
bambax
The illustration in the article is extremely appropriate.
It's quite strange why Americans tolerate that an unelected, and even unappointed foreigner would destroy their country piece by piece. Isn't that exactly what the much-touted second amendment was designed to prevent?
Edit: YCombinator "AI Startup School" [0] used to present the list of speakers, and Musk was the first one on that list. Now there's no list anymore. It would be interesting to know if it means he's not coming, or if YC isn't comfortable with publishing their choices.
[0] https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus
Original text on that page was: YC is throwing our first-ever AI startup school in San Francisco on June 16 and 17th.nnAI Startup School will gather 2000 of the top CS seniors, masters, and PhD candidates in AI to hear from speakers including Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Andrej Karpathy, Andrew Ng and many more
breput
It literally was scripted already in the Project 2025[0]:
They said exactly what was going to happen, all pre-planned, and anyone is surprised that it is happening?
To be clear – FUCK Project 2025 and especially FUCK anyone messing with NOAA/NWS.
And if you think I'm exaggerating:
"Focus the NWS on Commercial Operations. Each day, Americans rely on weather forecasts and warnings provided by local radio stations and colleges that are produced not by the NWS, but by private companies such as AccuWeather. Studies have found that the forecasts and warnings provided by the private companies are more reliable than those provided by the NWS."
[0] https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA…
"Break Up NOAA"
everybodyknows
Wondering if the unacknowledged agenda Musk is acting on is to cut off all data that informs us of the trajectory of climate change?
saulrh
I'll point out some higher order impacts of this, since the article doesn't: Losing these forecasts will be catastrophic for American farmers. Crops literally live and die on weather forecasts; forecasts tell farmers what to plant, when to plant it, how to plant it, how to water it, and when to harvest it. Without these forecasts we will see negative effects on the entire American agricultural industry and all of the people it feeds, US citizens or not. I'm not a farmer myself, so I can't tell you exactly how severe the impact will be, but there will be an impact, whether it's an immediate crop failure and outright famine this year or "only" shockwaves bouncing through our entire economy as farmers plant the wrong crops and go out of business over the next few years. This is one of the scenarios I've been most worried about when it comes to the stability of human civilization, up there alongside the looming specter of nuclear war and the randomisation of US foreign policy.
agilob
>The Trump administration has informed NOAA that two pivotal centers for weather forecasting will soon have their leases canceled, sources told Axios.
And the work will eventually be outsourced to IBM who are working on forecasting AI models.
ggm
Out the other side of this will be diversified weather reporting with less reliance on the US. They lose influence.
Fine, save short term costs. Fine, expand the private weather marketplace in America. Ok, so explain to non giant agribusiness US domestic farmers why they now pay for what was a free/low cost service. They vote more by numbers than the corporates do. So you've alienated your base for what?
Tornado season may be interesting or another beast from the east, or reduced air flight reliability.
koshergweilo
> It was designed to integrate multiple forecasting centers in one building to improve operating efficiency
Oh man, the irony of the "Department of Efficiency" closing down a branch that was made specifically to make the system more efficient
pogue
While it's important to point this issue out, I have to say that this "blog post" is nothing more than a link to a Bluesky post and a verbatim copy & paste of the Axios article on the subject.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/03/doge-noaa-weather-building-…