McClatchy - Lawmakers Fight for 'Hurricane Hunter' Funds

News Article

By Erika Bolstad and Curtis Morgan

With the cleanup from Hurricane Irene continuing and Katia looming in the Atlantic Ocean, some lawmakers and top federal scientists are making their case for maintaining healthy research budgets that sharpen the accuracy of hurricane forecasts.

At issue are planned cuts to research flights by the three-plane "Hurricane Hunter" squadron based at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A spending plan that the House Appropriations Committee passed in May would slash the budget for such research flights from $29 million to $17 million.

As Congress returns to Washington next week, the debate over how much money to spend on those flights - and how to pay for natural-disaster recovery in tight fiscal times - is expected to intensify. There's a looming fight over not only research budgets, but also the amount of money the Federal Emergency Management Agency has on hand to pay for tornado response in the Midwest and other disasters across the country.

The emergency money, once routinely approved by Congress, got caught up in the politics of federal spending this week when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said that any spending on emergency relief would have to be offset by cuts in other parts of the federal budget.

"Why do we have to keep going through these kinds of battles?" said Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who vowed Thursday after a tour of the National Hurricane Center in Miami to restore the budget for the NOAA flights.

Some fellow Republicans panned Cantor's remarks, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose state is struggling to recover from floods caused by Irene last weekend.

Although Christie - often mentioned as a Republican presidential contender - made no mention of the research budget, he was critical of the political debate in Washington.

"Our people are suffering now, and they need support now. And they (Congress) can all go down there and get back to work and figure out budget cuts later," Christie told a crowd in the flooded town of Lincoln Park, N.J.. "Nobody was asking about offsetting budget cuts in Joplin," the Missouri city devastated by a tornado in May.

The NOAA, too, is on the offensive, making it clear how vital the research flights are to improving forecasts. Many forecasters say short-term savings would come at high long-term cost. Better forecasts can save lives and money by shrinking evacuation zones, which can cost tens of millions of dollars in lost business, they say.

Last Friday night, as Hurricane Irene approached North Carolina, NOAA's deputy administrator, Kathleen Sullivan, conducted interviews via satellite phone from one of the P-3 Orion turboprops that were flying into the storm. The agency's administrator, Jane Lubchenco, took to her Facebook page to praise the accuracy of the forecast track for Irene, but warned that "to significantly improve storm intensity forecasts, we must continue to invest in research and observation-gathering technology."

Other lawmakers are expected to join the call for maintaining a robust research program, part of a 10-year plan to improve the accuracy of the intensity forecasts that the National Hurricane Center issues. Among them is Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who will oversee a hearing next week on FEMA spending by a subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

"During Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in my home state six years ago this week, we saw firsthand the importance of comprehensive disaster preparedness and response," Landrieu said. "It makes no sense to cut programs that help respond to future disasters in order to pay for emergencies that have already occurred."

Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., has said she would amend the proposed cuts to the hurricane-hunter budget on the House floor.

"For communities across the country facing the threat of devastation from hurricanes, there is no greater asset than information," Castor said in a letter to the House speaker and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. "The cost of the hurricane-hunter operations pales in comparison to the lives and money saved with the increasingly accurate predictions that come from these flights."

Nelson on Thursday was flanked by Bill Read, the hurricane center's director, who repeated concerns that he expressed in an internal memo last month, in which he wrote that without the continued support of the Tampa air operation, "we risk falling short or failing altogether" the goals of the NOAA's Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project.

That 10-year plan, which began in 2008, aims to reduce storm track and intensity errors by 50 percent and improve the accuracy of predicting rapid intensity changes, a dangerous phenomenon that remains a major gap in forecast science.

Tools that have been developed by the planes - including instruments dropped into the storm that measure its intensity, and Doppler radar, which gives forecasters a view of a storm's inner workings - provide essential data to hone computer models that predict a storm's path and power.

"It's our only real tool to know exactly what's exactly going on at the time when we put out our advisories about the structure and intensity of these systems," Read said.

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