Climate change brings more rapidly intensifying hurricanes; NOAA cuts makes forecasting them harder
Posted on 11 August 2025 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters
As Hurricane Helene roared toward the Florida Panhandle on September 26, 2024, the storm put on an intimidating display of rapid intensification, ramping up from a Category 1 hurricane with 80 mph (129 km/h) winds to a Cat 4 monster with 140 mph (225 km/h) winds in the 24 hours before landfall. Storm damage rises exponentially as the winds increase, so this rise in intensity increased Helene’s destructive power by a factor of about 92, according to a NOAA damage potential scale.
Rapid intensification – defined as a 35 mph (56 km/h) or greater increase in the maximum sustained wind speed within a 24-hour period – is something 80% of major hurricanes (Category 3-5) undergo at some point during their lifetime; a remarkable 96% of Cat 4 and Cat 5 storms do so. Hurricanes that rapidly intensify just before landfall are extremely dangerous, as they can catch forecasters and populations off guard, risking inadequate evacuations and large casualties. In a 2024 study, hurricane researcher Kieran Bhatia found that deaths and damages from hurricanes that undergo rapid intensification near landfall are significantly higher than for other storms – even after accounting for the storm’s intensity at landfall.
Fortunately, every National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast from the first advisory correctly predicted that Helene would undergo rapid intensification. Even so, Helene’s impact caught many off guard. The huge death toll – at least 176 direct deaths – makes Helene the third-deadliest U.S. hurricane in at least 60 years. Helene’s $79 billion price tag was the seventh-costliest weather disaster in world recorded history.
Figure 1. Deadliest U.S. hurricanes (direct deaths only), according to data from NOAA.
Hurricane forecasts will suffer because of NOAA cuts
Multiple degradations of hurricane forecast capability occurred this year that will hurt our ability to make all kinds of hurricane forecasts, including those for rapid intensification:
- Reductions in regular twice-per-day upper air balloon soundings. Data from the balloons is typically the most important ingredient in making reliable model weather forecasts. The Washington Post reports that from March 20-May 26, 17% of all U.S. balloon launches that should have occurred did not, mostly because of NOAA staffing losses. However, some of the data loss may be offset in the future by data being provided to NOAA by a private company that launches weather balloons, WindBorne.
- Staffing losses of about 600 employees at National Weather Service offices. As I reported on May 28, staffing losses at offices along the hurricane-prone coast were typically 10-20%, with Houston suffering a 44% loss. The Miami and Key West forecast offices have lost about 40% of their staff. About 450 of these NWS vacancies nationwide can now be filled as a result of a change in designation removing them from the ongoing federal hiring freeze, according to a Substack post on August 5 by Alan Gerard, but this process will take time.
- A 30% staffing loss at NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division. This is expected to cause a 50% reduction in crewing of the Doppler radar and dropsonde stations on the NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft, according to the Congressional testimony by former division chief Frank Marks.
- Staffing losses of computer weather modeling personnel at NOAA labs.
- Failure to renew the contract for utilizing ocean surface drones (Saildrones) to collect data in hurricanes.
As retired NHC chief hurricane forecaster James Franklin wrote on his Substack feed: “While there is resiliency in the hurricane forecasting enterprise, where strength in one area can cover for a weakness elsewhere, that resiliency is being stripped away, piece by piece. I fear that our hurricane products and services are suffering a death by a thousand cuts.”
“NOAA posted details of its 2026 budget request to Congress, which closes more than a dozen world-class weather and climate facilities across the U.S., including Miami’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory and its Hurricane Research Division, institutions responsible for most of the advancements in hurricane forecasting and science over the past 50 years.”
If this budget is enacted, it would be a crippling blow to hurricane research, likely halting or even reversing the significant progress that has been made in hurricane forecasts in recent years. Members of Congress have expressed that they do not support such a massive cut to NOAA, but it remains to be seen if this desire will be enshrined in law.
Forecasters almost lost a key tool for predicting rapid intensification this summer
Fortunately, for Hurricane Helene last year, NHC forecasters had the luxury of having a full suite of microwave imagery data from polar-orbiting satellites to use for their forecasts. Microwave instruments are critical for making accurate rapid intensification forecasts, since the sensors can “see” through obscuring cloud cover to make an MRI-like 3D scan of the internal structure of a hurricane in ways that conventional visible and infrared satellite imagery cannot. And in locations where the Hurricane Hunters do not fly – all of the Southern Hemisphere, the northwestern Pacific, and usually the Eastern Pacific – microwave data is often essential to making accurate intensity forecasts (see this explainer by Michael Lowry).
Rapidly intensifying hurricanes are growing more common
Unfortunately, the multiple cuts to NOAA this year decrease our ability to make rapid intensification forecasts at a time when the frequency of this most dangerous type of hurricane is increasing because of human-caused climate change. The most recent research on the issue, “Warming-induced historical (1871-present) increase in tropical cyclone rapid intensification,” concluded, “We compare the observed, simulated, and projected changes and show that the increase in global (and North Atlantic) rapid intensification represents an emergent global warming signal.”
Climate change theory, modeling, and observations show that increasing the amount of heat in the ocean increases the odds of rapid intensification, with the largest increases in peak intensification rates occurring for the most extreme cases. For example, during the period 1970-2020 in the Atlantic, the 99.5th percentile of maximum hurricane intensification rates for a 12-hour window expanded from 42 mph to 60 mph. In other words, those hurricanes are intensifying more now.