This article by Yale Climate Connections is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
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 winds to a Cat 4 monster with 140-mph 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 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 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.
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 to 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 Substack: “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.”
And a stupendously crippling cut to our capability to make better hurricane forecasts may be coming if the administration’s 2026 NOAA budget proposal is adopted.
As reported by Michael Lowry on July 1, “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.
NHC has made significant progress in recent years forecasting rapid intensification (see Fig. 2). And a 2024 study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Social Value of Hurricane Forecasts,” found that recent advancements in hurricane forecasting have a huge value: an average cost reduction of $5 billion per major landfalling hurricane over the period from 2005 to 2020.
The benefits came either by decreasing deaths and damages or by inspiring confidence in decisions not to spend money on pre-storm adaptation. But given the multiple losses in forecasting capability that have occurred this year, this progress may halt or even reverse beginning in 2025.
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).
This critical data source was severely threatened when the Department of Defense made a sudden and unexpected announcement in late June that microwave data from the SSMIS instruments on their Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites would no longer be made available beginning June 30. After an outcry, this termination date was changed to July 31, then permanently waived on July 29. The satellites are predicted to reach the end of their lives in 2026, but are already operating 15 years past their expected lifetime, so we may have a few more years with this valuable data.
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.
