Predictions for deadly Alaska storm may have suffered due to DOGE cuts

By Andrew Freedman, CNN

(CNN) — The forecast for the powerful and deadly storm that battered small communities in western Alaska over the weekend was likely made worse by a lack of weather data triggered by the Trump administration’s cuts.

There is a gaping hole in weather balloon coverage in western Alaska — a critical shortage bedeviling US forecasts and the National Weather Service since layoffs hit the agency as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s push to shrink the federal government back in February.

Weather balloons, which are typically launched twice a day, provide crucial information on wind speed and direction, air temperature, humidity and other measurements. Balloon data is fed directly into the sophisticated computer models used to predict the weather.

However, there were few, if any, balloons to take measurements of what the weather was doing as the remains of Typhoon Halong approached Alaska late last week.

Such data could have helped the models more accurately predict the storm’s path and intensity, as initial model projections had the forecasts suggesting the worst conditions would strike farther to the south and west than they did. Models like the NWS’ Global Forecast System (GFS) consistently showed a stronger storm to the northwest of where it eventually struck. The communities that ended up seeing the worst storm surge flooding were not in the original forecasts.

While NWS forecasters in Alaska issued many warnings for the area that ended up bearing the brunt of the storm, they did so without the aid of accurate model projections made days in advance.

The balloon gaps in this region are well-known to the NWS and might also affect forecasts in the Lower 48 states.

“All of the systematic losses are in western Alaska,” according to Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

There are currently no weather balloon launches in Kotzebue and St. Paul Island, Alaska, Thoman said. And in Bethel, King Salmon and Cold Bay, only one balloon launches each day rather than the standard complement of two.

In Nome, there are two balloons being launched per day, but communications issues flared up in the few days prior to the storm, preventing weather data from being accurately and completely transmitted back to the NWS, Thoman said.

He described this storm as “the nightmare scenario” for forecasters, with a depleted NWS leading to fewer weather balloon launches in the runup to a major storm.

“The impacts at any given place are extremely sensitive to the exact track and strength of the storm,” Thoman said, noting that as recently as last Thursday, forecasters thought the brunt of the storm would hit the Bering Strait, only to see that shift north by Friday.

He called it a “major model fail,” though it’s hard to know how much of that was due to the lack of balloon observations.

Alaska isn’t alone in seeing balloon data gaps, with some NWS offices in the Lower 48 states struggling to launch them twice a day as well. The NWS is currently in the process of hiring meteorologists, technicians and other specialists after the deep DOGE cuts led to service outages.

The storm hit western Alaska Sunday before moving north and pushing into the Arctic Sea early Monday. The hardest-hit areas are more than 400 miles southwest of Anchorage. Wind gusts hit 107 mph in Kusilvak while nearby Toksook Bay recorded a gust of 100 mph, according to the NWS.

The storm killed at least one person in the village of Kwigillingok with a few people still missing after it brought feet of storm surge to small and vulnerable communities on Alaska’s west coast.

Helicopters have been plucking people off rooftops for rescue from flooding and structural damage. Rescues have taken place in Kwigillingok as well as the village of Kipnuk, with more than 1,000 people displaced to shelters.

“If you imagine the worst-case scenario, that’s what we are dealing with,” said US Coast Guard Capt. Christopher Culpepper.

“Not having balloons didn’t help” the forecast, said a NOAA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, although forecasts for Alaska also rely on data from Asia as storms move from that region into North America.

“I’m sure it had some impact,” the official told CNN, though the errors the GFS made were within the average error for the model. Other models, such as the flagship of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, also featured sizable errors, the official said.

How big of a difference the missing balloon data made, though, may never be known. The best way to determine that would be to run computer models with weather balloon data fed into them and without it, in what is known as a data denial experiment — impossible to do without the data itself.

“I don’t know how we could ever know what impact not having all of these (balloons) in the days leading up to Halong had,” Thoman said. “You can’t do data denial experiments if there’s no data to deny, right? So to my mind, it must have had some impact on model performance, whether it was a lot or whether it’s a little, we just don’t know.”

“It definitely did not help.”

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CNN’s Hanna Park and meteorologist Mary Gilbert contributed to this report