Schumer Slams Congress For Cutting Funds To Hurricane Tracking Systems

Senator Chuck Schumer slammed his congressional colleagues Sunday for proposing to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for weather forecasting systems. The cuts would lead to a “catastrophic” reduction in the ability to predict the paths of hurricanes and other storms as early as next year, Schumer warned.

The Senator blamed underfunding for miscalls on the projected path of Hurricane Joaquin, which initially was predicted to slam into the East Coast.

“In the era of super storms, accurate weather forecasts are not a luxury – they are a necessity,” Schumer said in a press release. “It is just plain dumb to cut hundreds of millions from our weather satellite system just when catastrophic storms are getting more extreme and more frequent.”

President Barack Obama proposed $380 million for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to build new polar-orbiting weather satellites, which scan the planet and provide data used by meteorologists. However, Schumer revealed that the Republican-controlled Senate want to cut that funding by $240 million and the House of Representatives asked to eliminate all of it.

The funding cuts would delay the construction of a replacement for one of NOAA’s two polar orbit polar-orbiting satellites, which provide 85 percent of the data used in weather forecasting. Schumer said NOAA would be left with only one polar-orbiting satellite by the beginning of 2016.

Schumer called on Congress to restore funding for NOAA, adding that the cost of natural disasters greatly increases without proper storm forecasts.

“In 2014, the United States suffered eight major weather and climate events, costing approximately more than $1 billion each,” Schumer said. “The lack of adequate funding for the program would severely delay the construction of these much-needed satellites.”