The push by President Donald Trump to reduce the size of the federal government has meant cutting hundreds of positions at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors the ocean and forecasts the weather.
NOAA management won’t reveal how many jobs have been cut and won’t comment on whether any jobs were pared at San Diego’s office of the National Weather Service, which is run by NOAA.
But those in San Diego who work closely with the agency said the cuts will be felt by the public because of what NOAA does.
“Like predicting weather both day to day and when the big ones come, like hurricanes and tornadoes. They help us to understand how many fish we can pull from the ocean and continue to do that both productively and sustainably,” said Brice Semmens, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
Semmens is director of a NOAA-Scripps partnership called the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI), which gathers data in ocean-going vessels about fisheries, ocean chemistry and pollution.
Scripps Oceanographer Clarissa Anderson, who works on the project, said many of the people aboard those vessels have lost their jobs.
“Last week, when these terminations began, all the sea-going staff on the NOAA side, that keep these four month-long cruises a year going, were terminated,” Anderson said.
The CalCOFI program began with the crash of the sardine population, which once fed a thriving industry in California. It continues to try to safeguard fish populations.
Anderson is director of another partnership between Scripps Oceanography and NOAA, called the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. She said these partnerships are important to weather forecasting and to the U.S. Coast Guard, who rely on ocean current data for search and rescue.
“Without them you really wouldn’t have weather service models that work,” she said.
“And if you fall in the ocean you are going to be found 40% later than you would have because we didn’t have these data because the Coast Guard requires these data in their models to tune them. To make them accurate so that people can be found.”
