When scholars of authoritarianism and fascism leave U.S. universities because of the deteriorating political situation here, we should really worry.

In fact, though this is not widely known, most or all private weather companies in U.S. (including forecasts that you see on TV or your favorite app) are built directly atop backbone of taxpayer-funded instrumentation, data, predictive modeling, & forecasts provided by NOAA.
7/11

I work extensively with weather and climate scientists who work in the private sector—all of whom do good and important work that I greatly respect—yet even within the private sector there is near unanimous agreement that NOAA and NWS are indispensable.
6/11

Despite widespread discussion to the contrary, the fact of the matter is that the private sector, as it presently exists, simply cannot quickly spin up to fill any void› left by substantial dismantling of NOAA and/or the NWS.
5/11

NOAA & NWS collectively offer tens to hundreds of billions of dollars each year in economic benefit through combination of averted losses & efficiencies gained. More importantly, NWS saves countless lives by issuing high-quality weather forecasts & extreme weather warnings.
4/11

The U.S. NWS is a truly world-class meteorological predictive service, perhaps singularly so. Its cost of operation is only ~$3-4/yr per taxpayer—equivalent to a single cup of coffee—and yields a truly remarkable return on investment (at least 10 to 1, and perhaps 100 to 1).
3/11

It appears that staff fired today include meteorologists, data scientists responsible for maintaining weather predictive models, and technicians responsible for maintaining the nation’s weather instrumentation network (among many others).
2/11

The mass firing of both new hires and recently promoted senior staff within #NOAA, including mission-critical and life-saving roles at the National Weather Service (#NWS), is profoundly alarming.
1/11