Three weeks after the 24-hour Cheyenne National Weather Service office was forced to shut down overnight operations due to federal staffing cuts, a small number of eliminated positions may be returning – but no one knows if positions will come back to Cheyenne.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has been recently authorized to hire 125 meteorologists and weather specialists for offices nationwide.
CNN reported on Monday that the NWS is countering recent staffing shortages with a wave of new hires and transferring staff from over-staffed to understaffed offices.
This is in response to cuts at the NWS, which include laying off 560 employees and drastically reducing the frequency of weather balloon launches.
The NWS Office in Cheyenne has felt the impact of the layoffs, as it no longer has 24/7 weather monitoring after losing its overnight staff.
This new hiring surge could boost the staffing at any of the five NWS offices covering Wyoming, but that’d be a small gain for what’s been lost.
“It’s a tiny band-aid on a big cut,” said meteorologist Don Day. “One hundred and twenty five is better than zero, but a lot more is needed to get these NWS offices back up to where they were and need to be.”
An Ongoing Issue
Day has been concerned by the lack of staffing at NWS offices for years. The latest layoffs were just another hard blow to an increasingly dwindling workforce.
“A lot of offices in the rural United States were having a hard time getting people to come and work there before these layoffs,” he said. “It was a problem before this presidential administration and Elon Musk.”
Getting 125 new NWS employees is “obviously good news,” according to Day. However, it won’t be enough to cover the dearth of staffing the NWS has been struggling with for years.
Furthermore, there’s a question of where these new hires will go. It’s almost hurricane season, so understaffed offices in the South and Midwest might have more priority than anywhere in Wyoming’s vicinity.
What About Wyoming?
While Cheyenne won’t go without overnight weather coverage, losing its overnight staff at its own NWS office is far from ideal. Day worries that Wyoming could get lost in the ongoing reshuffling.
“You're always going to get the argument that parts of the country that have more population, so they should get more people, more assets, that type of thing,” he said. “I’d argue that it’s not as simple as that.
Concerns about the lack of severe weather forecasting emerged after a series of devastating tornadoes swept through the South and Midwest. Many people felt the timeliness of warnings and evacuations was delayed due to short-staffed NWS offices that couldn’t monitor the evolving situations as effectively.
For Day, it’s worth noting that Cheyenne, a state capital, has no overnight staff in its own NWS office because of the recent cuts and layoffs. That’s an issue for Wyoming and the U.S. that should be addressed.
“Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota and Alaska were having a hard time before these layoffs,” he said. “It makes sense to have NWS offices staffed where the likelihood of severe weather is higher. I’m probably biased, but I think it's important that Wyoming's offices are as fully staffed as New York City’s.”
More, Please
The NWS hasn’t said where the 125 new staff will be placed, nor how it plans to reallocate its experienced staff to cover understaffed offices. NWS Cheyenne might regain its overnight staff, but whether it will is anyone’s guess.
For Day, it’s “a multi-layered” issue that will not be resolved by this hiring wave. Even if they find 125 qualified candidates, it’s a drop in a critically low bucket.
“It's not as simple as hiring more people,” he said. “I think it's just important that Wyoming's offices are fully staffed, but I don’t know how they’ll divvy these up. But they’re not going to fill those positions instantly, and there’s a lot more needed.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
