LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The National Weather Service has lost hundreds of workers in President Trump's second term. Is that making its predictions worse? Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports on a tornado outbreak that took forecasters by surprise.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: Early on April 13, the National Weather Service forecast almost no chance of tornadoes in East Central Kansas. But that evening, several twisters tore across the region.
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MORRIS: The next morning in Ottawa, Kansas, volunteers shoveled broken glass and debris while Colton George (ph), who rode out the storm in a hotel basement, came to grips with the tornado that ripped apart his hotel room, scattered his belongings and turned his life upside down.
COLTON GEORGE: Well, I was laughing about it, honestly. Had a few beers in me. Then you walk out, and it's surreal. Like, you're like, damn. You're homeless now.
MORRIS: He wasn't hurt, though, because the National Weather Service issued a warning in time for George to take shelter. In fact, no one was seriously hurt. That's the good news. But weather service forecasters typically know hours in advance where tornadoes are likely. And this time, they didn't.
JOHN MORALES: I'll tell you, forecasting in general - it has been degraded.
MORRIS: John Morales, a TV weatherman with four decades of experience, says that a couple of years ago, the National Weather Service would have released weather balloons all across the country precisely at 7 a.m. Eastern time. But that didn't happen the morning of the storm.
MORALES: That particular day, on the morning cycle of weather balloon releases, there were vast areas of the Midwest, Southwest and Intermountain West that did not have a weather balloon release.
MORRIS: The balloons did go up eventually, but by then, storms were already brewing over Kansas. Weather balloons are basically just enormous party balloons dangling $100 gizmos the size of cell phones that measure temperature, air pressure and humidity as they rise through the atmosphere. Morales says some Weather Service offices no longer have staff available for pre-dawn launches.
MORALES: So you see them being released during office hours as opposed to the hours that - where we really need them.
MORRIS: The National Weather Service says almost all of its approximately 92 weather balloon launch sites are functioning normally, with only a few missed launches. It says its forecasts keep getting better and better thanks to more powerful computers and increasingly sophisticated forecasting models. Those models are only as good as the information fed into them. Satellites and hundreds of ground-level weather stations generate reams of data, but the weather balloon piece is crucial. Take it out and, retired National Weather Service meteorologist Alan Gerard says, you're running a real-time experiment.
ALAN GERARD: OK. Well, what happens if you take a significant number of the balloons that we would normally release in the morning and delay them to midday? How is that going to impact our forecasts?
MORRIS: It's tough to tell how weather balloon data that was never collected may have changed forecasts. But anecdotally, the results haven't been great. Weeks before the surprise tornadoes in Kansas, a similar situation popped up in Michigan. Weather service forecasters put the state at only marginal risk of tornadoes before deadly twisters struck the state.
SHARICE DAVIDS: I mean, this is literally life-and-death decisions that get made based on the warning systems.
MORRIS: Kansas Congresswoman Sharice Davids, a Democrat, says the Trump administration hobbled the National Weather Service last year. It shed almost 600 employees through DOGE cuts and retirements. Then it turned around and hired 200 new employees. But those newbies will take months to train, and Davids says forecasts are suffering.
DAVIDS: Meteorologists are saying that data collection is starting to lag - that we aren't continuing to keep people the safest that we possibly can.
MORRIS: It's not for lack of trying. Gerard says his former Weather Service colleagues are doing their best.
GERARD: Weather Service employees overwhelmingly are very dedicated, mission-focused. So they're going to try to minimize impacts on their mission as much as they possibly can.
MORRIS: Government forecasters are facing more dark clouds on the horizon. Gerard says the proposed White House budget would essentially eliminate federal weather research and cap the Weather Service budget at about this year's level. What's more, he says a big agency reorganization is due to be announced this summer at about the start of hurricane season.
For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris in Kansas City.
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