A national discussion is underway on the role of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Weather Service in forecasting the deadly July 4 flash floods in Kerr County, Texas. The record shows that the hard-working meteorologists and other staff at the National Weather Service were successful in providing Texas Hill Country with timely, accurate forecasts.
It is critical to reflect on government role’s in the short term and build a minute-by-minute chronology of the disaster. But it is equally important to highlight the long-term investments America needs for climate and weather resilience. This means talking about the NOAA labs and other research centers dedicated to basic science. These institutions are essential to innovation in precipitation forecasting and warnings that save lives, yet they are on the chopping block in the president’s latest Fiscal Year 2026 budget proposal.
President Trump’s budget proposal called for closing all NOAA labs and cooperative institutes with universities. It also calls for closing its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which funds and coordinates with the labs and cooperative institutes. Congress is debating funding levels for NOAA research now as it begins the appropriations process.
A final budget aligned with the president’s proposal would devastate NOAA research, including precipitation research, rendering the agency unable to update and innovate the weather and climate models that support the military, businesses, individuals and community institutions like Camp Mystic in Texas.
Consider the significance of NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. The lab, working with the University of Oklahoma and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, developed the Flooded Locations and Simulated Hydrographs Project (FLASH), which improves the accuracy, timing and specificity of flash-flood warnings. FLASH doubled accuracy for the National Weather Service, improved spatial resolution by 500 percent, provided up to six hours of forecast lead time and improved forecasters’ ability to identify rare, severe flash floods.
Consider also the role of labs and cooperative institutes in developing NOAA’s newest hurricane model, the Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System. The model attests to NOAA’s commitment to continually improving its forecasts for potentially catastrophic natural disasters.
In 2024 alone, there were five tropical cyclones causing losses exceeding $1 billion in the U.S., and NOAA predicts an above-normal 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, with three to five major hurricanes. Hurricane forecasting is especially difficult in today’s era of “rapid intensification,” which refers to an increase in the maximum sustained winds of a tropical cyclone of at least 30 knots in a 24-hour period. The magnitude of rapid intensification in the central and eastern Atlantic Ocean has been increasing over the past 30 years.
The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System has made critical improvements in predicting the path and intensity of hurricanes. The model, operational since June 2023, has saved lives, property and infrastructure. In 2024, it successfully predicted the rapid intensifications of hurricanes Helene and Milton. At its peak, Milton reached Category 5 intensity and became one of the strongest hurricanes on record in the Atlantic basin. Helene landed in Florida as a Category 4 storm and became the deadliest hurricane in the contiguous U.S. since Katrina.
The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System’s success was no accident. Its design came to fruition after careful investment. It took five years of research and development from three NOAA centers of excellence: the National Weather Service Environmental Modeling Center, the Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory, and the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies.
Trump and his allies in Congress seem to think that Americans can enjoy NOAA’s finished products, such as high-quality hurricane forecasts, without spending a dime on basic research.
Eighty years of federally sponsored scientific research tell us otherwise. “Basic research leads to new knowledge,” wrote American inventor and engineer Vannevar Bush in a landmark report on science to President Harry S. Truman. “It provides scientific capital. It creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn. New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the purest realms of science.”
We cannot uproot the tree of science and expect it to still bear fruit.
Congress should fully fund NOAA research and all other parts of this essential agency, or risk endangering American lives, property and infrastructure.
John Dos Passos Coggin is a writer and former communications contractor at NOAA.
