NOAA's Storm Prediction Center facility among planned DOGE cuts [View all]

Source: ABC News

March 17, 2025, 5:11 PM


Despite the deadly storms over the weekend, one of the core government facilities tracking severe thunderstorms and tornadoes, is listed on the website of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency as one with a planned office closure.

The Storm Prediction Center -- one of several entities housed at the National Weather Center in Norman, Oklahoma -- issues severe weather forecasts across the nation and identifies threat zones where dangerous thunderstorms and tornadoes could move through days in advance.

A spokesperson with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- the federal agency that studies and reports on the oceans, atmosphere and coasts as well as oversees the Storm Prediction Center as well as the National Weather Service -- confirmed that the "building lease issue is in flux."

With this latest storm, the Storm Prediction Center began alerting about a potential significant severe weather event across parts of the Midwest and South several days ahead of the first tornadoes. The center also tracks which parts of the country could face critical to extreme fire weather conditions -- as Oklahoma, where the center is located, remains under alert for fire danger after being devastated by deadly blazes over the weekend.

Read more: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/noaas-storm-prediction-center-facility-planned-doge-cuts/story?id=119882272

---

SPC is headquartered in Norman, OK, operate "nationally", and will issue alerts like Tornado Watches wherever needed around the country (versus the local NWS offices doing that). Within the past decade or so, they had improved their warning systems so they could narrow potential severe weather impact zones by using "polygons" to carve out the area under the highest threat versus issuing something "county-wide", which helped to reduce the instances of people in areas many miles away from a storm, who got the alert anyway due to being in the county that was warned.

SPC, WPC (Weather Prediction Center) and NWPS (National Water Prediction Service - which monitors the river forecasts, including flooding (and is a new name for the old AHPS (Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service) as of last year), work hand in hand to cover severe weather, and its impacts.