How to Weather the Next Storm
In the wake of the Texas floods and ongoing cuts to NOAA and NWS, we need a National Weather Safety Board
By Eric Sorensen
Before being elected to the U.S. Congress, I spent 22 years as a broadcast meteorologist. I worked in active weather areas from East Texas to Northern Illinois, communicating the complex science of hurricanes and tornadoes to help my communities understand risk and take necessary action.
And after every big event, I always went back and asked myself, “Was there more that I could’ve done?”
On July 4th, when I heard about the flash flood in Texas that killed more than a hundred people, including many children, it reinvigorated that question for me. Politicians immediately began pointing fingers to one another while I looked to atmospheric and social science to find answers.
As the only meteorologist in Congress, it’s not political for me to say that President Trump’s attempt to reduce NOAA and the National Weather Service’s workforce by as much as 20% will make Americans less safe. We know that if you take away weather balloon launches, weather models become rife with error. We know that if we take away data collection from meteorologists, forecasts are less accurate. We know that if Doppler radars go offline during severe weather, entire communities will be at significant risk.
So what more can we do than choose the status quo, just waiting for the next disaster to happen? We can choose to move forward with a different approach, learning from extreme weather tragedies to develop best practices to keep people safe.
We have a model of how to do this: the aviation industry. There are about 45,000 flights every day in the United States. More than 10 million passenger flights in a year. Despite that frequency, the 2024 fatality risk in aviation was 0.06 per million flights.
We didn’t just happen upon a safe aviation environment. The United States developed a system of innovation and policy to keep people safe, in part by making it a priority to learn from air disasters so mistakes aren’t made over and over.
One disaster that will always remain in my mind was the tragedy that occurred on August 2, 1985 near Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. A Lockheed L-1011 with 163 people on board was on final approach at DFW when it encountered a microburst: an intense and concentrated column of sinking air underneath a thunderstorm. In 1985, we did not have the technology to identify the threat before Delta 191 flew through it, and the plane crashed on a highway short of the airfield, killing 137 people.
In the 40 years since there has been only one other microburst-related crash, and none since 1994. The only reason? It’s the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
When the NTSB analyzes crashes, it helps us refine designs and develop policies to make us safer in the air and on the ground. In the wake of the Delta 191 crash, the NTSB spurred action to develop the FAA’s terminal Doppler radars, which today identify microbursts and wind shear to keep flyers safe.
With increasing deadly weather events, now is the time to develop an NTSB of sorts for weather.
An independent body of this kind, a board composed of experts who deal with weather disasters, would help policy makers understand everything that led up to the disaster in Texas:
What did we know about the potential for dangerous weather?
When did we identify the significance?
Did we communicate risk effectively?
Were messages received by decision-makers?
Were safety decisions made in a timely manner?
Did everyone have the ability to get the warning?
Did we have proper building codes to protect human life?
These are questions that would allow us to answer, as a nation, what more could we have done?
It’s not just the meteorologists I talk to who are in full support for a new “National Weather Safety Board.” Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are excited about this approach.
The goal is simple: we must do as much as we can to save people from the next potential killer storm. Developing a new independent review board will aid NOAA and the National Weather Service meet their mission of protecting life and property and ensure our communities are ready for whatever storms come next.
Everyone deserves the information they need to stay safe. And we must work to make sure we better understand dangerous weather, effectively communicate risk, and develop policy to help people stay safe.
The tragedy of the Delta 191 crash was motivation enough for us to create the Doppler radars that have kept countless other flyers safe for decades. The 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic in Texas, as well as the 108 others who died this month, should be enough for us to develop a new way to keep Americans safe from the weather.
Let’s do this for them.
Congressman Eric Sorensen is a meteorologist and the U.S. representative for Illinois’ 17th Congressional District.
As an Aeronautical Engineer that works on Airplane Safety, I think this is a brilliant idea. Also something like the FAA Lessons Learned From Transport Aircraft Accidents data base but for weather would be a great thing to create to pass on knowledge to the next generation. That way if something is learned it gets out into the world to help everyone else learn and not make the same mistake again in the future.
https://www.faa.gov/lessons_learned/transport_airplane
This is a good idea and one that should be explored. My question is that with trump shutting down and firing so many NOAA and NWS offices and personnel, how would you make it work. It surely can't be a government funded entity. I would like to hear how it can be done.