The National Weather Service uses the Internet to disseminate warning information to people all around the country. Under the proposed 2013 U.S. Budget, all the staff who ensure those systems work would be cut.
With the 2013 budget proposal now released by the Obama Administration, priorities of the White House can be more accurately determined. Science continues to take a back seat in the United States, with another year full of NASA-gutting, which I’ll get into at a later time. I suppose if it is no big deal to cut the budget for scientific space exploration, it isn’t that much of a leap of faith to arrive at the reality of cutting the budget for terrestrial science in general and meteorology specifically.
The $911 million 2012 fiscal year operating budget of the National Weather Service is set to be cut by over 4% to $872 million. The trimming would save $39 million dollars or expressed another way, 26.557 minutes of the Pentagon’s expected 2013 budget. So, what do you lose by trimming less than 27 minutes of Pentagon activity? All of the information technology operator positions, ITOs, across the country would be let go. The ITO is the person who ensures all the technology at a local weather office is working, provides an extra set of eyes in busy severe weather situations if needed, and helps facilitate the transfer of information from weather forecasting systems to the much-easier-on-the-eyes output that one would see on the National Weather Service’s website.
