It has happened again. Yet another devastating weather event — this time the deadliest December tornado outbreak on record, and probably one of the top 10 deadliest for any month — has reminded us that we’ve entered a new era of environmental extremes. While we don’t yet know the link between climate change and this particular event, we do know that a warming climate has increased the effects of extreme weather, which scientists agree will only get worse in the years and decades to come.
As a nation, we must meet this moment by doubling down on efforts to improve forecasts and early warnings in the face of what Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell rightly called “the crisis of our generation.”
The Weather Forecasting Research and Innovation Act of 2017 led to important advances in forecasting. These include the establishment of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tornado warning improvement program, greater incorporation of private-sector data into National Weather Service models and forecasts and establishment of NOAA’s Earth Prediction Innovation Center.
In the years since, however, our world has changed dramatically. Every year brings more disasters to more places with higher costs. Local communities don’t have the tools and resources to cope with more frequent and more intense flooding, heat waves, wildfires and other environmental extremes.
Even before the recent tornado outbreak, the United States had been ravaged by multiple compound weather events this year. A weakened polar vortex caused extreme cold that crippled energy infrastructure throughout Texas and the Southeast. Hurricane Ida made landfall along the Gulf Coast with its causing disastrous flooding in the highly populated Northeast.
Congress has acknowledged this and has begun to act. The bipartisan PRECIP and FLOODS bills aim to revise the Weather Act to improve NOAA’s precipitation estimates and decision support to reduce flood-related impacts and costs. More can be done, however, especially in view of the inflection point we are at today, where private industry has the technology, capital and velocity to deliver solutions in a fraction of the time and cost than our federal agencies can do on their own.
We believe the following three updates to the Weather Act could accelerate improvement of our nation’s weather and climate resilience:
∙ Expand and expedite commercial data sources. The Weather Act provides NOAA the authority to purchase commercial weather data, place weather satellite payloads on government or commercial satellites and conduct commercial weather data pilot programs.
∙ Make more use of other transactional authority. The 2019 amendment to the Weather Act provides NOAA with “additional transaction authority” to enter into agreements with commercial and other organizations for the “construction, use, operation, or procurement of value-adding” platforms and data when NOAA objectives cannot be met otherwise.
∙ Tap private-sector innovation for weather and climate services. The Interagency Council for Advancing Meteorological Services was established by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2020 under the authority of the Weather Act “to improve coordination of relevant weather research and forecast innovation activities across the federal government,” with the intent of elevating meteorological services to the highest levels of government.
To help achieve the council’s charter in providing societal benefits with information spanning local weather to global climate, Congress should add language requiring it to conduct a study on emerging private-sector capabilities and commercially available off-the-shelf solutions.
Collectively, these three adjustments to the Weather Act could be considered the climate equivalent to the National Institutes of Health’s extraordinary response to the pandemic. Combining a whole-of-government approach and featuring Department of Defense as a colead, NIH forged an ambitious and agile partnership with 20 biopharmaceutical companies to accomplish a moonshot for modern medicine.
This isn’t to say that we advocate for industry replacing the Weather Service by charging U.S. citizens for lifesaving services. Rather, industry can take on a greater role while the government continues to set standards and provide oversight. The idea is for the government to do what only it can do and the private sector to do what it can do better, resulting in better performance and return on investment.
NOAA is looking to receive nearly $1 billion in funding from the recent bipartisan infrastructure deal and anticipated FY22 appropriations for forecasting capability improvements, with more than $47 billion in the bill designated for climate resilience. If our combined 100-plus years of service in and collaboration with the U.S. government has taught us anything, it is how slow federal acquisition processes are in allocating resources of that magnitude.
Greater contributions from the private sector can help us improve forecasts and early warnings at the speed and scale our nation needs and expects. Codifying them in a Weather Act 2.0 would jump-start an Operation Warp Speed for weather and climate, and the lifesaving impact could rival that of vaccines for the pandemic.