A great weekend of learning and collaboration – but the absences and threats were tangible as well

Sep 09, 2025

I am back from the 50th National Weather Association (NWA) Annual Meeting in Huntsville, and want to focus my post today on my experience. I generally always find professional meetings such as this to be rewarding, productive experiences. It is an opportunity to network with and learn from colleagues in a way that is really unique to these sorts of events, and I almost always come away from attending these meetings energized and more committed to my profession.

The NWA Annual Meeting holds a particularly special spot in my heart. The NWA is an organization that formed 50 years ago with the specific goal of serving as a professional organization for those in the operational meteorology community. Back then, the other primary meteorological professional organization, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), was seen as primarily serving the academic and research communities, and operational meteorologists in the National Weather Service and military communities wanted an organization for their needs. The NWA was formed for that purpose, with a peer reviewed journal (National Weather Digest), newsletter and annual meeting focused on operational meteorology.

The AMS Annual Meeting is special in its own way as it is a collection of conferences focusing on a wide variety of atmospheric science topics that brings together thousands of scientists from around the globe. The NWA Annual Meeting has always been a smaller, more manageable, almost familial meeting in which there are opportunities for all members of the profession and weather community, from students starting off their studies to senior level academics and executives, to learn from each other and build professional relationships. I felt that unique environment at my very first meeting — the 20th Annual Meeting in Houston in 1995 — and it started my career long active engagement with the organization, including serving as the association’s president.

While I was only able to attend this year’s meeting for the opening weekend, I wanted to be there to not only celebrate 50 years of this organization that has meant so much to my professional life, but also — to be honest — because I felt like I needed an infusion of professional hope. It has been a rough year for our field — and science in general — and I wanted the opportunity to be able to visit with longtime colleagues about what is happening as well as hopefully talk to and learn from the next upcoming generation of students and young professionals.

My goals for my weekend trip to Huntsville were more than met. I participated in both the student and broadcast meteorology sessions, including an outstanding and important forum on the future of weather communication in our new digital age. At the end of the day on Sunday, I participated as a mentor in the speed mentoring session for the student conference, which was an incredibly rewarding experience talking with and both (hopefully) helping and learning from these bright, talented young people. I also of course throughout the weekend had the chance to see and visit with colleagues I had not seen in years — in many ways, it felt like a professional family reunion.

Unfortunately, like many family reunions, there were some holes due to missing family members — and in this case, the holes were large and noticeable. With all of the budget cuts, staffing shortages and new administrative hurdles for travel, there were only a handful of NOAA/NWS employees in attendance. Only a few of the NOAA employees in Huntsville were there as official government representatives; several others took vacation time and traveled to Huntsville on their own given their own belief in the importance of being there. Needless to say, the amount of NOAA participation in the meeting was a small fraction of what is usual for the primary annual meeting focused on operational meteorology.

As a long time federal employee, I am fully aware that there is a public perception — in some cases supported by actual bad behavior by federal agencies and employees — that government employee attendance at conferences such as this are a boondoggle. I can only speak for my own experience as a NOAA employee and scientist, and say that I found that the science focused professional meetings that I attended were incredibly important and beneficial for helping me meet my mission related job duties.

The weather community in this country is a unique partnership among the public, private and academic sectors. Professional meetings such as this are the events where relationships among the members of those sectors can be forged, and where lessons and research results from each sector can be shared with the others. These meetings will be much less effective if one of the major sectors is essentially unrepresented. In fact, I talked with a couple of private sector attendees this weekend who bemoaned the lack of NOAA participants and said that interacting with them is a primary reason they attend.

My understanding from talking to colleagues still at NOAA is that NOAA participation at the upcoming AMS Annual Meeting is expected to be similarly impacted, and the recent biennial AMS Radar Meteorology conference was pretty much devoid of NOAA attendees. There have of course in the past been occasional periods of reduced government participation in these meetings due to tough budget periods. However, what we are witnessing today seems to be a much more intentional effort to reduce government support for science, and I wonder about the future viability of these professional meetings if the lack of government participation is a semi-permanent, long term trend.

Another concerning thing I observed this weekend came out of my conversations with students. I was struck by the fact that almost every student I talked to, either as part of the formal mentoring session or just in side conversations, seemed to have no firm future plans and emphasized to me that they were “keeping their options open” and unsure whether they would pursue graduate school, a public or private sector job, or broadcast meteorology. This was even for students with impending graduation later this fall or spring.

To me, this was highly unusual, as most meteorology students I work with usually have a pretty good idea of what they want to do, certainly by their senior year. To be fair, the broadcast meteorology field has its own uncertainties due to the evolving television industry, but clearly the biggest reason for these students’ confused future plans is the federal government’s confused future plans. While the NWS has started entry level hiring meteorologist positions again, I do not think anybody could confidently say after the last 6 months that federal employment seems particularly stable (and I got that nervous sense from a number of the students). Furthermore, the number of graduate school opportunities — and what the related research for those opportunities will be focused on — is primarily based upon federal grants and funding. Obviously, right now nobody has any sense of what that will look like in the coming years.

There are a lot of struggles within the science world — and world in general — these days due to all of the major federal reductions and policy changes, and what I am talking about in this post are obviously relatively small concerns in the overall big picture. However, to me these are very visible symptoms of the decay of science within my field just from what we have seen in the last several months. I recognize that we as a nation have a limited budget and have to prioritize our spending. I feel it is important, though, to document what is happening in the science I am familiar with so that people can understand what is being impacted and lost by the decisions we are making today.

Ultimately, I came away from this weekend with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was very encouraged by the passion for weather science and communication that my colleagues continue to have and the incredible talent and drive of the students I met with. However, I am also extremely concerned that if we continue down the path that we are currently on with federal funding and staffing cuts, we will see the symptoms I observed this weekend spread and worsen. The result will be that we will quickly fall behind the rest of the world with regard to weather and climate science, and we will leave ourselves more vulnerable to damaging and deadly weather events that are growing more frequent and impactful.