(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (music fades and ends) - Well, very few things in this world affect every single person on the planet.

The one thing that does is weather.

A weather forecast determines what we wear, and sometimes how we feel.

But more importantly, it can save lives and make or break economies.

That's why a lot of people are upset that the Trump administration is making cuts to agencies that help our meteorologists forecast the weather.

Two of Central Illinois's longest tenured and most popular meteorologists join me now to weigh in on these cuts.

Chuck Collins with "25 News," and Chris Yates with WMBD.

Good to see you guys.

- Good to be here, Mark, thanks.

- Good to see you.

- Well, we should say too that we're all former coworkers with you guys, so it's good to see you.

- Yeah.

- Let's talk a little bit about these cuts, and things are changing by the day.

People are being cut, people are being rehired.

Chuck, why don't we start with you?

Can you give us an idea of how the National Weather Service impacts the forecast that meteorologists give to us?

- Yeah, Dr. Marshall Shepherd, who's a leading atmospheric science professor at University of Georgia, said it best, "You can't get rid of the potato farmer just because you buy your fries at McDonald's."

Meaning, we have to have the source for the information and then we disseminate it.

And that's where we are.

I mean, you look at your phone, your computers, your apps, your pads, whatever, I mean the information, a lot of it, weather watches, warnings, advisories, special weather statements, current conditions, come from the Weather Service.

They don't just magically appear on your app, they come from somewhere, and they come from the Weather Service.

So it has a huge impact on everybody because that's the source region for everything.

- And we should remind people the National Weather Service is a part of NOAA.

- Right.

- So NOAA and the NWS facing hits.

Chris, you've spent time down in Lincoln, where our local radar is.

And of course, we've got radars all over the country.

Can you tell us about the operation down there a little bit?

And I know those folks are hardworking 24/7.

- Yeah, if you've never had a chance to, get an opportunity to go down and tour an NWS facility, 'cause you get to see just how much work they actually do.

As Chuck said, everything you get on your phone, everything we relay on TV.

Now, the forecast is usually our own, more often than not, but all that forecast data is based on stuff that comes from NOAA or the National Weather Service.

And when we have really bad weather, one thing that has improved a lot over the last 20 years is the collaboration between meteorologists like us on TV and those at the National Weather Service.

It's good to bounce ideas back.

They listen to us, we listen to them.

We all kind of make sure we're on the same page when we're in high-impact events.

And that's where you can't, that's not something that can be easily replaced if you start cutting away people at, so they're constantly working.

Their primary goal is to protect lives and property, period.

Forecasting is part of the job, but it's not their main thing.

For us, forecasting is mainly our job, right?

And then we will relay warnings from the National Weather Service.

Could we do it ourselves?

Not as efficiently.

We're gonna miss a lot more stuff if it's just left to the TV stations.

Because we need other sets of eyes that we don't have available on hand at a TV station to do that.

So it's easy for us that when we have severe storms, for instance, the Weather Service issues the warning, we get the notifications, we then direct our attention to that and we can stay with that storm until the next warning pops up and then we can start bouncing back a little bit more.

Instead of diving into tracking storms.

A lot of people don't realize that there's more than usually one person at the radar desk.

There's usually two.

And that's on a relatively easy day.

If we've got a massive outbreak going on, you'll have a total of four people sitting there looking at radar, and with the rest of the team of the National Weather Service doing a bunch of other stuff, getting reports, talking to EMA, listening to ham radio, all that stuff.

And it's a constant feed of data so they can issue the best and most accurate warnings.

- And it would be cost prohibitive for us to do that.

- Yeah.

- I mean, we couldn't afford the staff to do that.

People talk about privatization of the Weather Service.

I don't think the private sector can afford it, especially a single site Doppler radar like we have at Lincoln, for instance, and all over the country.

I mean, those are expensive.

You have to have them on a micro level.

You don't have one giant radar that covers the entire country.

You have to have single-site radars, and it would be cost prohibitive for us to have that.

We don't have the staff to do that.

I don't, you don't.

- [Chris] We don't.

- We couldn't afford to have that type of staff.

Especially when we're talking about ground zero warnings and watches and advisories and serious weather.

We're partners, we relay that information and we put our own expertise on it as well to let the viewer know exactly what's happening.

But yeah, that'd be cost prohibitive to do that.

- One of the big tools that the National Weather Service uses are weather balloons.

And as we're taping this, I know a weather balloon in one Alaska City says it won't be launched, temporarily suspending some launches in Albany, New York and then in Maine.

How important are these weather balloons and what happens if we don't have them or they're not launched as often?

- You wanna take that one, Chris?

- Yeah, they're crucial to getting an idea of the entire atmosphere.

In order for models to project what the future is going to do, we need to know what it's doing now.

Otherwise, any gaps between them, there's already a lot of gaps.

If you're wondering why forecasts change so much over a three, four-day period, it's because we're doing a lot of guessing as to what the initial conditions are right now.

There's a lot of water that covers the globe.

That's a lot of space where you don't have observations.

There's a reason forecasts and improve when storms move over land.

It's because now we're getting better data, and a lot of that data comes from weather balloons.

Now, there's still a lot of gaps, so there's still a bunch of guessing that's going on.

But the more we can fill those gaps with balloon launches, the better things are going to be.

Now, they're suspending launches occasionally, which tells me more often than not that we're still gonna be getting data, which I think is gonna mitigate this from becoming a significant issue.

I know we had issues when we had the helium shortages a couple years back.

They had to dial back certain balloon launches.

Then they were able to prioritize.

"Okay, we'll only launch on bad weather days."

Now if they don't have the staff for it and we desperately need a balloon, that's gonna be a problem.

I mean, I've seen complete forecasts bust because a handful of balloons just weren't calibrated right.

So that stuff is important.

I know it might seem like an old technology, but it works the best because it can sample the entire atmosphere.

It gets a lot higher than airplanes.

It gets a lot higher than drones.

Drones and airplanes can help fill the gaps, but they can't cover everything.

- And weather balloons, last I checked, like $200 a pop.

Well, Lincoln does two a day and you have a couple of hundred offices that launch balloons.

I mean, there's a lot of money in that technology.

Once again, it's something I couldn't do, I couldn't afford to do.

But we need that information.

And plus, when we're anticipating severe weather, they usually do two balloon launches a day, One in the morning, one in the evening.

If we're having severe weather, they might do a special midday launch just to see what the atmosphere is doing because we're anticipating severe weather.

That'll give us a better idea of severe weather to come later that day or that evening.

So yeah, like Chris said, it almost sounds like ancient technology, but the balloon relays information back to the home base.

It's all fed into mega computers and we come out with the observations we need to know to do the forecast or predict severe weather.

- Speaking of ancient technologies, a lot of the stuff we use, radar itself is a very old technology now.

It's been updated, it's been modernized, but it's still a relatively old system.

There are a lot better radar systems that do exist that maybe one day can be implemented into the future.

But that's not gonna happen when you cut funding.

One of the limitations to getting those better radars is the lack of funding.

In my opinion, we probably should be putting more money into the industry instead of taking it out because there's a lot of promising technology that's just waiting out there to be harnessed by the weather community in general.

And a lot of great research.

The future, I think, for tornado warnings and what's down the pipe, coming down the pipe, is very, very promising in saving lives and increasing lead times.

But that's not gonna happen if you start taking away funding.

- Yeah, and we're looking at the next generation radar coming up already.

I mean, the Lincoln Radar was put in in 1995.

It's been updated, but the entire next generation of radar, we have to invest in that technology in order to increase warning times.

Warning times, I've been doing this so long, I go back to the days of a magnetic weatherboard, for heaven's sakes.

But anyway, I didn't have radar when I first started doing weather.

I've been doing weather 37 years out of 49 in the business.

I didn't have radar.

And when Lincoln came in, had Doppler radar, wow, what a game changer that was because it increased the warning time dramatically in situations.

And the next generation will do even better than that.

So that's one thing that, Chris is right, that radar has to be up there and we need actually more funding, not reduced funding, in order to improve that technology.

- I'm curious, we keep talking about Lincoln, because it's the closest radar to us, I'm curious what would happen, and nobody's saying that these offices or radar is gonna be shut down completely, and we've seen instances where there have been updates and upgrades in Lincoln that they've had to shut down.

We've got radars in the Quad Cities that may be the next closest one or St. Louis.

But what would happen, let's say, if Lincoln closed and we had to rely on those other radars?

How much of an impact would that have on doing a forecast, especially during severe weather?

- Yeah, yeah, Chris?

- Yeah, hopefully that never happens.

But you're gonna be looking at, and I would imagine even if the office closed, that the radar site itself would probably stay the same because it fills an important gap.

But we've had examples of this.

There were some bad tornado outbreaks.

I think the May tornado happened when the Chicago radar was under maintenance.

And it was routine maintenance.

There was nothing really wrong, they just needed an upgrade.

And unfortunately, we had a big tornado outbreak at that time in that area.

So we were looking, instead of looking at the radar 2,000 feet off the ground, we're now looking 15, 20,000 feet up.

Well, a lot of storms are rotating at 15 to 20,000 feet up.

And so it's hard to get any ground truth.

Thankfully, it's an area that was well-spotted because it's a highly-populated area.

That's the downside, it's populated.

But we had eyes on it.

But if that's happening in a more rural community, you get into Western Illinois where we start seeing a little bit more radar, some holes in the radar gap due to elevation, it gets a little more questionable.

And so if we were to lose some of those sites permanently, that would be terrible.

Because there's already a bunch of radar, our part of the world here, Central Illinois is actually well-covered, relatively speaking, to some other rural communities.

After spending part of my career in Wyoming, we had a lot of big gaps.

- I bet.

- And half the time you can't even see what's falling out there because the radar overshoots the showers and the thunderstorms.

There's parts in the Carolinas that are actually, there's some big cities that don't have really good radar coverage.

So those are kind of important, and hopefully, those never go away.

- Yeah, and obviously if Lincoln radar goes down for maintenance, we can be covered by Chicago, St. Louis, Quad Cities.

But the fact of the matter is we're getting so many wind farms around the area, there's talk that we actually need another radar here because we're getting interference from those wind farms.

And there's plans on the table to maybe put another radar in Central Illinois because we're getting some problems with wind farms as well.

So that's totally vital as far as the radar is concerned.

As far as the Lincoln office, I don't think that'll happen.

But they're chipping away as much as they can.

I know we've heard of Weather Service offices being without a technician to work on the radar if something went down with it.

They can bring in other techs from other offices, but that wouldn't be a speedy recovery for anything.

So, yeah, it's vital.

- Well, according to reports, in February there were a lot of retirements from NOAA and the NWS.

On March 7, 586 probationary employees were cut from NOAA.

108 of those coming from the National Weather Service.

And CBS is reporting that the next round of layoffs this month, we could see a combined loss of 20% of the NOAA staff.

And NOAA, again, National Weather Service is part of NOAA, but NOAA does a lot more also.

Can you guys talk a little bit about what that organization has in its umbrella?

- [Chuck] Yeah, Chris, do you wanna...?

- [Chris] Yeah, obviously there's data collection, there's NCEP.

There's also a lot of stuff with fisheries.

For those who don't know, NOAA falls under the Department of Commerce.

So all of this is to any food you get that's imported, especially when it comes to the fishing and that industry, I would imagine there's gonna be some heavily regulatory stuff that happens there.

Probably in any climate research, those would probably be some of the areas that I would expect to see more cutting.

Hopefully, they don't put more cutting down towards the National Weather Service.

You can kind of think of the Weather Service as the police force for protecting us against severe weather.

'Cause you can't change it.

There's no policy that's gonna stop a tornado or a severe storm from coming through.

The best thing you can do is warn.

And so not knowing what the intent is, where those are gonna be, hopefully, they can just prioritize those cuts further up.

And I would try to stay away from, get away from anybody who collects data or who even researches anything around safety.

People's getting warning a lot faster.

Model improvements, there's a lot of exciting stuff that's been developed and I would hate to see all that research being cut short.

- [Chuck] And we're talking too Hurricane Center, Storm Prediction Center, the other place in Boulder, Colorado, Weather Prediction Center, Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

They study El Nino, which has a drastic effect on our weather from time to time.

So there's a lot of agencies under the NOAA umbrella.

And Chris is right, the Weather Service budget comes under the Department of Commerce, because our founding fathers, even that early on, realized that weather affects the economy.

And I think that's one of the main advantages that we have in this battle, that it affects the economy.

So something that affects the economy to the tune of billions of dollars a year, in fact, trillions over years, I know people will start taking notice of that.

And I think some of these things may be changing.

I have heard just through the grapevine that some of the probationary people have or will be called back.

So I don't know how many of 'em, but I've heard that's a trend, like in a lot of other agencies that have been cut.

Now, all of a sudden, "Yeah, well, we're putting people back in."

So we'll have to wait and see how that pans out.

- A lot of, "Oh, by the ways," I think, after a lot of these cuts across the board.

Chris, it sounds like what you were saying earlier is if they do have to have cuts in NOAA and NWS, that's inevitable that they're gonna have some cuts, it might be better higher up in terms of you want the people with the boots on the ground to stay.

- Yeah, keep the boots on the ground.

I'm sure, like there is with every bureaucracy, every business, there's probably fat to be trimmed somewhere.

There's not many people who say otherwise.

But if you can prioritize where that needs to come from and not hurt the ground floor, which already has been short staffed for years.

The short staffing is not a new thing.

Ever since I've been in the business, there's been offices that have been short staffed.

And there are ways.

They can modernize, and I'm sure this is in the pipe, they're gonna modernize the Weather Service a little bit more.

That's something that needs to happen.

They have the ability, so if one office is short staffed, maybe they can bring somebody in remotely, and they do this all the time, when there's bad weather and a National Weather Service office needs to seek cover from a tornado, they'll call up their neighboring office and say, "Hey, I need you guys to cover for us while we go seek cover."

They can easily pull from other resources like that, but it's still not ideal.

It's good to have people familiar with the area, close to your home, in your community that understand it, understand the weather, and to get you the best, most timely information and accurate information.

- Yeah, and the micro scale of it all.

I mean, having just in the region, especially with radar, it's so vital to have it on a micro scale, not a huge scale.

We have overlapping radars, but it's nice to have that radar centered between Peoria, Champaign, Decatur, Springfield.

Consolidation of offices back in the mid-'90s with Doppler radar did that.

So it's vital to have that regional touch to it as well.

Chicago can give us probably good radar, and Davenport, but like Chris said, it's the regional or the local touch that we still need.

- Sure, speaking of economics, one of the things that I found was from the American Meteorological Society.

They did a study that says the National Weather Service costs each taxpayer four bucks a year.

- Yeah, dollar-for-dollar it's probably the best investment you make.

I don't know how much we pay per military, but I would say that's probably a good investment even though it's probably considerably higher.

But for $4 a year, you can't get a subscription to a halfway decent radar app for that cost.

So it's a very good investment.

If you've ever took shelter for one tornado warning, I'd say your $4 was well spent.

- Yeah, yeah.

0.02% of the federal budget is the Weather Service.

- [Chris] That's small.

- And like I said, $4 per person.

- Let's talk about the future of forecasting, because you mentioned that there are a lot of spots open in the National Weather Service.

Is that because fewer people are interested in the field or they just weren't filling those spots?

- I think they just weren't filling the spots.

There's a ton of interest.

There's probably more interest now than ever before.

- [Chuck] Yeah, yeah.

- I mean, when I was in grade school, meteorology was a chapter in my physical earth science class.

And it was just clouds, that was all my.

And now you go, we got meteorology.

You got full on weeks of lessons in grade school now, which is fantastic.

So there's a lot of interest from a young age.

And of course, you got all the storm chasers doing their stuff.

So you're not gonna find a lack of enthusiasm for the field.

That's constant.

So the people are there to get hired, they just need to be willing to hire 'em.

- [Chuck] Yeah, exactly.

- Well, having worked with both of you, I've seen the work that you do in your respective weather centers and it makes my head explode.

(Chris laughs) We all have our critics and people that criticize weather people say, "Oh, why don't you just stick your head out the window?"

Or all this other silly stuff.

But you guys put in a lot of time and effort in doing these forecasts, and they're not always perfect.

- [Chris] No.

- [Chuck] Well, and- - 'Cause Mother Nature.

- Exactly.

- Exactly.

- And I come from a little bit different perspective, because like I said, when I first started doing weather, we had a magnetic board, didn't have any radar.

- [Chris] Yeah.

- There was no radar.

We got a couple of radar shots a day maybe from the University of Illinois.

And I didn't even start with electronic graphics.

And so during my lifetime, the technology explosion has been super and we have to continue that.

We just can't shut it off because of where we're at.

We have to continue to do that.

And I enjoy the technology because when I was growing up, a tornado warning was issued when a funnel cloud was sighted or a tornado touched down.

Well, it's a little bit late by the time that happens.

We didn't start getting Doppler-indicated tornadoes till 1995 when Lincoln went in.

And we go on for hours with extended coverage.

You, I, our weather teams.

20, 30 years ago, we didn't have the technology to be on the air and do that.

We couldn't take a look inside the storms and look at what we call the velocity or rotation, things like that.

We couldn't do that.

And that was all based on what the Weather Service has and the Weather Service products they put out, including radar.

- Well, folks in Logan County and Lincoln may remember, on top of the Logan County Courthouse, there was a phone booth that someone would stand in and look for storms.

So we've come quite a ways.

- [Chris] We've come a long way.

- Yeah.

- We've come a long way.

- Exactly.

- If you had the president here or his associates, what would your pitch be to save as many NWS and NOAA jobs as possible?

- I would say, obviously, as Chris said too, there's cuts that can be made.

The fat can be trimmed in a lot of different departments.

But those in charge of keeping the public safe need to be left alone as much as possible.

There are other cuts that can be made.

I know everybody has to pick their battle, and I'm not politicizing anything here, but there are cuts that can be made.

If local managers, Weather Service managers are told, "Yeah, look and see where you can trim the budget here and there," fine.

But if you're talking lifesaving information, you just can't mess around with that too much.

- Yeah, just prioritize.

Find where there's excess, cut that.

But that takes more of a, it takes more patience.

It takes more thorough going through office by office, finding out where there's redundancies.

And it's the government, there's plenty of, and I know the Weather Service's been trying to clean some of that up themselves.

They've had duplicate reports going out for years and they finally stopped.

They're starting to cut back on that.

It's just it takes forever for those changes to occur.

And I know that just people, this administration is, "All stop," but sometimes you can't do that when it's people on the front lines.

- Right.

- We've got a few minutes left before we go.

I gotta ask you guys, how do you deal with the critics, especially now that we have social media where it's so easy to be an expert and criticize the way you guys do your work?

Chuck, how do you handle it?

- Okay, once again, I come from a different background.

When I first started doing weather, people would just call the front desk.

They'd make a notation on a notepad of what, and that's it.

Well, then we got into emails and now we're into social media.

I handle it a couple of different ways.

Number one is you don't wanna engage too much with people.

You need to explain exactly what's going on, what happened.

The biggest problem, somebody asked me what my biggest challenge was in forecasting.

My biggest challenge is social media, because there are so many forecasts.

I mean, your neighbor down the street can put a forecast and say, "We're gonna get 10 inches of snow next week."

And then people share that and it goes all over the place.

And then if we don't get 10 inches of snow, it's our fault, it's everybody's fault.

Especially those who know weather.

So that is the big problem.

And that's my biggest forecasting challenge, is a situation where social media, because everybody and anybody, and people will hear that.

They hear 10 inches of snow and we get a couple, "Oh, you were wrong."

Well, we didn't forecast that.

- We didn't forecast that.

- That wasn't our forecast.

- Yeah.

- So social media, but I handle it like this.

I will send them a nice reply.

If they start getting malicious or snarky, then I'll get malicious and snarky with 'em.

I'm 49 years in the business.

I've earned the right to tell people what I think.

- [Mark] There you go.

- And that's what I do sometimes when I have to.

- Real quick, Chris, what about you?

- Same, I probably, sometimes I say probably too much.

I probably go back and forth a little too much.

I do have a few people that I know are gonna be snarky.

And that's just kind of the relationship we have on social media, so I try to dish it out.

When I do need to stop, though, I stop, I step away and let it be.

- Well, I remember a few weeks ago I jumped in on one of your- - Yeah, that was one of 'em.

- 'Cause I've got nothing to lose.

(guests laugh) And I feel bad for you guys, 'cause I know how hard you work.

Well, gentlemen, this was very interesting.

This is something we're gonna keep following.

And we hope these cuts, whenever and however they happen, are minimal so you guys can keep doing the great work that you do.

- Appreciate it, thank you, Mark.

- All right, guys, thank you.

That's all of our time right now.

We appreciate you joining us.

You can check out this interview, if you missed any of it, on our website, WTVP.org.

And check us out on social media, Facebook, and Instagram.

"You Gotta See This" is next.

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