MICHAEL HO WAI LEE/SIPA USA VIA AP
Weather forecasts from the National Weather Service are free to consumers and businesses.
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
When it comes to summer weather in the eastern half of the country, people either whine about the haze and heat, the humidity and the thunderstorms, or they debate the best free app to track what’s coming next.
Name brands like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have free smartphone apps for the basics: high and low temperatures, sun or clouds or rain. More advanced hyperlocal alerts and frequent forecast updates or models will cost you. Clime, a newer offering, bills itself as an “all-in-one weather assistant” and offers freebies like current radar maps and seven-day forecasts. But severe weather “Clime PRO” add-ons like lightning or hurricane trackers will set you back $9.99 a week (which they call their “most popular” option) or $99.99 for the year.
For most people, it’s the zero-dollar options that get the highest praise. The National Weather Service (NWS) serves up weather and climate data free of charge for consumers, and for the businesses that create these weather apps. Don’t look for an NWS phone app: The agency doesn’t have one, though it does have a shortcut that takes a user to weather.gov, its portal for forecasts, watches and warnings, and other resources. But the broader effort to design a new mobile-friendly site has been thrown off-kilter: A beta version of that site notes that it has been “deactivated until further notice due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources required to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.”
Despite a treasure trove of public-facing weather intelligence, Americans may be headed toward the day when they have to pay for anything beyond the basics, and where your ability to know about imminent danger depends on how much money you have to spend on it.
The Trump administration’s scorched-earth march across the federal bureaucracy threw hundreds of NWS forecasters, researchers, and contractors across its 122 weather forecast offices out on the street in the run-up to hurricane season. Local communities depend on the agency to be on top of its forecast game to determine storm tracks, wind speeds, and precipitation that help put teeth into evacuation orders or shelter-in-place advisories.
Any new weather forecasting sector would be dominated by Big Tech, which has already shown a disposition toward monopolization.
The top weather-related recommendation in the far-right Project 2025 blueprint was to “break up NOAA.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the division of the Commerce Department that houses NWS. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has delivered on this promise. Though the rampage appeared to leave the forecasting agency largely intact, retirements and other vacancies that cannot be filled under a hiring freeze have put it in worse shape than expected. CNN reported that nearly one-quarter of the weather forecast offices don’t have a head meteorologist, including in hurricane-prone cities like Houston and Tampa. Alerts in Spanish and other languages were temporarily suspended. And daily weather balloon launches that yield the most precise information about weather patterns have been curtailed.
Project 2025 proposed that NWS “should focus on its data-gathering services” and “fully commercialize its operations.” First of all, it’s hard to understand how forced retirements and layoffs of over 550 public-sector workers (equivalent to all of the departures at the agency over the past 15 years) improve data collection, analysis, and dissemination. In May, five former NWS directors released an open letter to the American people. “Our worst nightmare,” they wrote, “is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.” The wholesale abandonment of core responsibilities like the data collection that powers national and local severe storm forecasts is a first-level disaster.
But what’s even more puzzling is that Project 2025’s paean to the private sector glides over NWS history. The private weather sector, composed of weather forecast firms, private forecasters, and meteorologists working for media outlets, and academic departments and research institutes, has been deeply embedded in NWS for decades. While these sectors have butted heads, overall this public-private partnership is flourishing, successful (and evidently lesser-known)—and it’s at risk.
Weather forecasting, particularly for hurricanes and severe storms, is complex. A disturbance can be on a course for one state and shift direction to strike a different one: In 2012, Hurricane Sandy changed course. It veered from a northern track to a northwestern one, made landfall close to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and severely affected metro New York.
Does a private weather forecaster want to be on the hook for a hurricane forecast that changes dramatically? Federal government meteorologists are held blameless for busted forecasts, but private weather companies have fewer protections, which is one reason why firms have been satisfied enough with the status quo to let NWS shoulder the burden of informing the public about severe weather events.
“In its responsibility, the government holds the liability,” says Craig McLean, a former assistant administrator of NOAA Research who retired three years ago. “The agency is responsible for that project. The idea of just writing a deep contract and paying a commercial entity doing what the weather service does today, it just does not compute.”
Judicial precedent has protected private forecasters—for now. In Brandt v. The Weather Channel (1999) a federal district court rejected a claim that the network was liable for the death of a man who went out on his boat and drowned since the cable network had not provided any warnings about choppy seas or approaching bad weather. “Because prediction of weather is precisely that—a prediction—a weather forecaster should not be subject to liability for an erroneous forecast,” the court found.
CHRIS GREENBERG/AP PHOTOS
A weather balloon is prepared for launch into the atmosphere in Sterling, Virginia.
It’s not just severe weather watches and warnings that private companies could balk at providing for free, if at all. Would a private weather firm want to make a meteorologist available to talk to community members about possible severe weather?
In the tornado-prone Paducah, Kentucky, area, keeping the Amish and other off-the-grid communities aware of weather developments is a major concern. To keep them in the loop for basic forecasts and hazardous weather information, NWS meteorologists set up a phone tree complete with an option to speak to a human. But a private weather company may be no more willing to serve off-the-grid communities than companies like Amazon are to deliver packages to remote locations. Shippers contract out those runs to the U.S. Postal Service; who would be left to provide critical, free information to the general public if NWS is decimated?
Incidentally, Paducah is one of the weather offices without a chief meteorologist; that’s true of all the offices primarily serving Kentucky.
In the absence of a robust NWS, some companies may try to paper over forecasting gaps with technology. Although artificial intelligence can make fine predictions in certain instances, it’s only as good as the data dumped into it. It’s reliable enough to hit the mark on forecasting a week’s worth of high and low temperatures. But predicting a storm with Hurricane Katrina–like characteristics going into an area off the coast of North Carolina may not be as accurate, since there isn’t enough data to train AI on. Humans have to be involved with overseeing forecasts.
If the executive branch continues to dismantle weather agencies and stops collecting and storing data, that’s also a challenge for AI researchers. “AI is as good as the information that it processes,” says Kari Bowen, a science and administration manager at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Earth System Research and Data Science. “If something happens to historical climate data [or] data streams, AI will be impacted.”
NOAA’s hurricane hunter flights collect data used to plot storm track and intensity. That data is at risk if NOAA is forced by budget cuts to make fewer flights with fewer scientists; according to current reporting, aviation capacity at the agency is down 25 percent. The Air Force also has hurricane hunters, but the NOAA crews have Doppler radar that provides detailed views of the entire storm track and intensity, data points that state and local officials use to weigh evacuations against shelter-in-place orders.
Federal cost-cutting has even gone after tools that are cheaper and more accurate. Launching weather balloons is a regular task at NWS offices. A balloon carries an instrument into the stratosphere, the second layer of the atmosphere. When it pops, the instrument lands on Earth with valuable information. Offices that only had 15 to 20 people to begin with will have fewer people to collect 24/7 measurements.
The quality of information collected by weather balloons can be better than that of satellites or on-the-ground instruments. The retrieved data indicates how much energy is stored in the atmosphere that can be released as a severe thunderstorm. Kerry Emanuel, an MIT professor emeritus of atmospheric science, argues that reducing weather balloon launches is counterproductive: “You’re not saving very much money and you’re decreasing the value of the forecast much more than you’re saving money.” What will happen is that severe weather outbreaks will be that much harder to predict.
Even hundreds of buoys moored in the ocean yield valuable data when storms approach. But the possibility of all of this data collection disappearing leaves experts wondering how anyone in the private sector could fill the gaps.
If NWS doesn’t do it, who would? “It’s just hard to imagine any institution and any company could come in and take on all of that,” says David Stensrud, a Penn State professor of meteorology and atmospheric science. “Basically, you’d have to give everything NOAA owns to the private company, just to be able to maintain the system as it is, before you could transition into something else. I would think that would be a multiyear process if it would even work.” He added, “I guess anything can work, if you throw enough money at it, but just the transition itself would cost millions of dollars to move all that someplace else.”
Mary Glackin, a former NOAA deputy undersecretary and a past president of the American Meteorological Society, fears that any new weather forecasting sector would be dominated by Big Tech, which has already shown a disposition toward monopolization. Microsoft, Google (both companies working on AI weather forecasting models), and others would invest heavily and pick off select components like satellites before they’d recruit the people with the know-how to repair them.
There’s little evidence that private companies want to throw any money at something that they get today for free. There’s scant altruism in the relentless fixation on their own bottom lines. Business-to-business weather companies could theoretically use profits from selling specialized forecasts to farmers, fishers, airlines, and other companies to power free data for everyone else. But that would require an interest in serving the public, such as keeping severe weather watches and warnings in a basic tier of service at no charge. That’s not necessarily what the profit motive drives private companies to do.
The 2025 hurricane season promises to be a real-time evaluation of whether the National Weather Service is broken beyond repair or if can be resuscitated and redeployed. At the very minimum, there has to be a recognition that any acceleration toward a system whereby some people pay for lifesaving data while others just watch and wait has catastrophe written all over it. No country should triage its weather forecasts. Says Bowen of CU Boulder: “I don’t want to see a day where the only way someone can get a weather warning is if they’re paying for it.”
