A year of Trump Administration 2.0 has brought a lot of difficulties to the scientific world – but I found the determination to keep moving service to society forward undiminished

Feb 06, 2026

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As I have mentioned in previous posts, last week I attended the American Meteorological Society annual meeting in Houston. For those unaware, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) is the predominant professional organization for the atmospheric and related sciences in the United States. Each January it holds an Annual Meeting, which is the largest gathering of scientists with interest in meteorology and related sciences in the world. Typically several thousand scientists attend the dozens of individual conferences and meetings that make up the Annual Meeting.

In the years since COVID, the meeting has taken on a hybrid format, with many people participating in the meeting remotely. Still, the in-person attendance at AMS is huge, and with attendees from the public, private and academic sectors of the weather community, it is probably the best venue in which to get a sense of how the community is doing and what its concerns are. Last year, the meeting was held in New Orleans the week before the second inauguration of President Trump. I think it is fair to say that there was an air of deep anxiety and concern around that meeting as people were worried about what the implications of a second Trump administration might be on the earth and atmospheric sciences.

Obviously, that first year of the administration brought serious turmoil, with major job cuts and changes at federal agencies such as NOAA, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. Given this, I was very interested to see what the “vibe” of the community would be at this year’s meeting, and what the core issues and concerns would be. And on a personal level, this was my first meeting after retiring from NOAA, meaning that I would be participating in a different capacity than in the past.

Over the last week, I have taken time to reflect on the conversations I had with colleagues at the meeting, as well as the panel discussions and sessions I participated in. I have also had the chance to chat with colleagues who were at the meeting to get some of their perspectives. In particular, I have had some great conversations with Gregory Porter, who is the senior newsroom meteorologist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and who has extensive prior experience working in the meteorological private sector. He put together his own excellent summary of thoughts and perspectives based on his meeting participation. I encourage you to read through it, and I will be referring to some of his thoughts as I outline my own views.

Before I get into this, I need to emphasize that obviously what I am outlining below are my own thoughts and opinions based on what I heard and saw last week (except of course where I refer to Greg’s comments). I want to start by sharing some feelings about the general frame of mind the community seems to be in after year 1 of this second Trump Administration and its various actions toward the federal science agencies and infrastructure. To be honest, the words I think that best summarize what I most often felt when talking to people last week were “grief” and “anger:” grief for the science that has been lost and the careers that have been damaged, and anger for the fact that there does not seem to be any clear rationale or plan for the actions that have been taken.

Federal attendance at the meeting this year was substantially lower than in past years, with attendance from the National Weather Service and the National Science Foundation in particular seeming much sparser than normal. While the NWS held a hiring event during the opening days of the conference and NWS Director Ken Graham gave a town hall in which he outlined the positive steps he is hoping to take for the agency in the coming months, my sense from talking to many former NOAA Research and NWS colleagues was that these agencies are continuing to deal with serious staffing, administrative and morale issues after a year of job losses and budget difficulties.

While the NWS does have authority now to hire a significant number of positions to help replace the hundreds lost last year, the federal hiring process was already slow, and conversations with current NWS employees indicate that serious job losses in leadership and administrative positions within the NWS and NOAA in the last year is resulting in even slower hiring and more bureaucratic bottlenecks. Similarly, lack of administrative support is resulting in serious issues with procurements and contracts, resulting in issues such as NOAA Research labs and NWS offices having difficulty obtaining key supplies and equipment, and at least temporarily losing contracts such as janitorial and IT services.

The academic and private sectors are similarly disconcerted, primarily because they are dealing with the downstream ramifications of the issues the public sector is dealing with. University professors and researchers are having to deal with cancelation of federal grants — and even when they have grants that are not canceled, the administrative disarray of agencies like NOAA and NSF is resulting in delays or issues with grant processing and funding. The uncertainty in future federal scientific funding and hiring makes it difficult for universities to plan for graduate students and to know how to focus their academic programs going forward. Meanwhile, many private sector companies are of course affected similarly by uncertainty about federal funding and the federal capacity for activities like procuring new observational systems and computing platforms.

The public-private partnership is something I dove into rather deeply at this meeting, as I participated in a panel discussion focused on this topic with several of my colleagues. As I talked about last week, one of the key ways in which the meteorological private sector has evolved in the last 10 to 15 years has been much more focus in the development of their own observational networks including radar, satellite and other remote sensing systems. My sense has been that while private companies will obviously sell data from these networks to other private entities, a key part of the economic viability of developing and maintaining these systems will be selling data to public sector agencies such as NOAA. NOAA will then use the data in their own modeling and forecasting efforts as well as potentially make the actual observational data available publicly.

However, a key aspect of that effort would have to be a transparent, well-developed process by which NOAA could validate the accuracy and value of the private sector data, and then a procurement system which would enable the private sector to have stable funding to develop and maintain such systems. It was noted in our panel discussion that currently NOAA’s procurement system as legally authorized does not allow the long term procurement actions that NASA and the Department of Defense can execute which allow that type of stable funding to private sector companies.

Greg Porter has much more experience in the private sector than myself, and he observed in his meeting summary that “NOAA announced at AMS that it intends to dramatically expand commercial data purchases, potentially billions of dollars over 10 years. The agency is also looking to extend contract timelines from five years to ten, be more transparent with industry about future data needs, and move toward a more flexible ‘data as a service’ model. That’s a meaningful commitment.”

With regard to commercial data quality, Greg noted that NOAA has done evaluations of remote sensing observations from Tomorrow.io and PlanetIQ and found them to be high quality. In my panel discussion, Climavision CEO Chris Goode talked about the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) his company has with NOAA to examine Climavision’s gap-filling radar network’s data quality, including as part of the National Severe Storm Lab’s Multi-radar Multi-sensor System (MRMS). Climavision radar data is already being shown to help provide improved information about meteorological phenomenon like lake effect snow.

However, there is real concern as to whether NOAA will have the staffing and budgetary resources to develop and manage processes to evaluate and utilize the expanding volume of commercial data that is likely to evolve in coming years. As Greg put it, “there’s still a wall between data procurement and operations. Staffing and funding constraints have hampered NOAA’s ability to actually utilize commercial data operationally. Even when the data validates well, the pathway to improving forecasts remains muddled.”

Another big topic of conversation at the AMS Annual Meeting was of course artificial intelligence and machine learning. Greg noted his feeling that the 2024 AMS Annual Meeting was where AI/ML really exploded in the meteorological world, and I totally agree. While of course the wave had been building for years prior, that was the point at which not only did AI/ML start to dominate a lot of the conversation, it was when numerous tangible improvements to forecasting systems began to be demonstrated in presentations within the scientific conferences at the meeting.

Fast forward two years, and AI/ML is a fully mainstream topic of conversation within our community. How AI/ML fits into the future of the meteorological world remains very uncertain, though. I remain concerned that the public (and academic) sector does not have the resources to be able to innovate with the speed and complexity that the private sector can, particularly companies with large computing resources such as Google, Apple and Amazon.

Partnerships can of course help here, as we have seen with NOAA and Google’s partnership in developing the highly successful Google DeepMind tropical cyclone model as well as NOAA’s leveraging of the GraphCast AI model for its own AI modeling development. However, my sense is that partnerships can only take the forecast and warning advances gained through AI/ML so far. Eventually, private sector companies will be looking for tangible profits from their development, and how that might come directly from “selling” to NOAA or marketing of jointly developed models and techniques remains unclear. In my opinion, NOAA must somehow ensure that the advances from these partnerships end up reflected in the life safety forecasts and warnings that are freely made available to the public and other governmental public safety agencies.

The conversations I had at the annual meeting suggest we are still a long way from figuring out how all of that will work, and I think NOAA — in partnership with the academic and private sectors — needs to make developing policies and procedures to help guide the transition of AI/ML advances to public sector operations a priority. Greg also has some (similar) thoughts about this topic, and I highly encourage you to read his thought provoking observations as well.

I have covered a lot of ground in this post — and while I started with my feelings that there is a lot of grief and anger in my community over everything that has happened in the last year, I want to finish on a more upbeat note by highlighting two other emotions that I saw in abundance at the AMS Annual Meeting: optimism and determination.

While the meteorological world has had a lot thrown at it in the last 12 months, I know from deep experience that the people that make up this community are incredibly dedicated to public service and using our science to improve society and the lives of the human beings they serve. That intense dedication has not gone away in the last year, and if anything, I think that the obstacles that have been thrown at our community have made everyone that much more determined to fight through the difficulties to keep our science and service moving forward.

And there truly is a tremendous amount to be excited about. The combination of improved observations and better scientific understanding have resulted in our ability to produce forecasts at levels of accuracy and resolution I could not have imagined when I started my career 35 years ago — and all signs point to an impending further revolution in the skill of these predictions by leveraging AI/ML and expanding observational networks. Meanwhile, social science research is enabling us to be able to better communicate the physical science information in a way that will truly yield improved societal outcomes. So while there are definitely many reasons for concern and anxiety, there are also plenty of signs of hope — and I continue to be confident that the incredible people that make up the atmospheric science community are going to continue to persevere through the obstacles to keep improving our service to humanity.