Weather
Get Ready For Killer Heat, New Report Warns
Staff cuts at National Weather Service offices create an imperfect storm amid an increase in weather extremes fueled by climate change.
Killer heat is expected to break records, if not this year, then at some point in the next five years, according to a new report that warns of more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes.
The report, released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office, said it’s probable the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago.
“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,” according to Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn't part of the calculations but told The Associated Press they “made sense.”
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“So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost,” Mahowald said of the report, which was released days ahead of the June 1 beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season.
The report comes at a time when the ability of National Weather Service meteorologists to tell people of weather dangers, including during a currently active tornado season, is at risk because of deep staffing cuts by the Department of Government Efficiency.
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This creates an imperfect storm for weather forecasters working in an era of uncertainty. Nearly half of the forecast offices have 20 percent vacancy rates, and some offices losing up to 40 percent of their staff.
Rich Thompson, lead operations forecaster at the NWS Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, told The Associated Press the job is getting done, but said staffing cuts have “made it harder on us.”
“It has made it hard on the local offices just to make sure that we have all of our important duties covered. But, I mean, most of the people take those important duties seriously, so we’re going to do what it takes to cover it,” Thompson said. “I hope we’re not in the same staffing situation long term. ... It would be hard to sustain this for months or years.”
Here’s a look at what is happening with climate and weather:
Years Of Killer Heat Ahead
“Killer heat” isn’t a euphemism.
Heat kills more people in the United States than any other type of extreme weather, according to a study published last August in the journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers noted a 117 percent increase in heat-related deaths from 1999 to 2023, with a significant upswing the last seven years of the study.
More than 21,518 people in the United States died from the heat during the period.
“It’s very likely that we’re going to continue to face these kinds of extreme heat issues,” Jeffrey Howard, an associate professor in public health at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the lead author of the study, told The New York Times. “It’s not something that’s going to go away.”
The report Wednesday from the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office bears that out.
Even minuscule increases in temperatures can cause weather extremes, according to the new WMO climate update for 2025-2029. The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists.
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said in an email to The AP. He was not part of the research.
Also, according to the two agencies who authored the report, for the first time there’s a slight chance that before the end of the decade, the world's annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s.
“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5C warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat,” Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter, told The AP.
“Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape,” he said
Ice in the Arctic — which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world — will melt and seas will rise faster, World Meteorological Organization climate services director Chris Hewitt told The AP.
What tends to happen is that global temperatures rise like riding on an escalator, with temporary and natural El Niño weather cycles acting like jumps up or down on that escalator, scientists said. But lately, after each jump from an El Niño, which adds warming to the globe, the planet doesn’t go back down much, if at all.
“Record temperatures immediately become the new normal,” Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson told The AP.
What’s In Store For Hurricane Season?
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts suggest an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season with between 13 and 19 named storms, including six to 10 hurricanes, three to five of them major, in 2025. The forecasts put the chances of a near-normal season at 30 percent and the chances of a below-normal season at 10 percent.
Other forecasts also suggest an active season, although not as supercharged as 2024, when hurricanes Helene and Milton contributed to the third-costliest year on record.
The hurricane season runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. The first named storm to develop this year in the Northern Hemisphere, Tropical Storm Alvin, formed in the Eastern Pacific Ocean south of Mexico on Thursday.
The massive DOGE cuts don’t appear to be affecting NWS offices in areas typically affected by hurricanes, including the uber-vulnerable Florida Keys, an archipelago historically has been known for its quirky and libertarian inhabitants who revel in the islands’ hedonistic, artistic and outdoorsy lifestyle and is now a haven for the wealthy
“The weather service is a good partner, and the field offices, from what they were telling us and what they’re hearing here, everyone is secure. They are not expecting or anticipating any cuts to the (Florida Keys) field offices,” Shannon Weiner, director of emergency management for Monroe County, Florida, told The AP. “So, of course, going into hurricane season, we’re really happy to hear that.”
NWS Offices Scramble In Tornado Outbreak
The National Weather Service, once a 24-hour-a-day operation, has ceased overnight staffing at at least four of its 122 weather forecasting offices because of the deep cuts by DOGE, according to the National Weather Service Employees Organization.
Offices now closed overnight are in Kansas and Kentucky, both of which have been pummeled with tornadoes this spring, and California, where forecasting offices in Hanford and Sacramento are no longer able to operate an overnight shift, The Washington Post reported.
The 2025 tornado season is on pace to be at least as active as 2024, second-most active year since 2000. About 1,025 tornadoes have been reported as of May 29, according to a preliminary count by the NWS.
The agency faced a stress test in mid-May when tornadoes touched down from Kansas to Kentucky, killing at least 27 people, including 18 in Kentucky, where another10 people were hospitalized in critical condition.
The office in Jackson, Kentucky, had been closing overnight but kept staff on overtime to stay on top of the deadly storms.
NWS spokesperson Erica Grow Cei told The AP the Jackson office “remained fully staffed through the duration of the event using surge staffing” and had support from neighboring offices.
“They’ll continue to answer the bell as long as they can, but you can only ask people to work 80 hours or 120 hours a week, you know for so long,” Elbert “Joe” Friday, a former weather service director, told The Associated Press. “They may be so bleary-eyed, they can’t identify what’s going on on the radar.”
Technologies used to predict tornadoes have significantly improved, but radar can't replace a well-rested staff that has to figure out how nasty or long-lasting storms will be and how to get information to the public, according to Karen Kosiba, managing director of the Flexible Array of Mesonets and Radars (FARM) facility, a network of weather equipment used for research.
“There really are not enough people to handle everything,” University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Howard Bluestein, who chased six tornadoes in a recent outbreak “If the station is understaffed, that could affect the quality of forecasts.”
Tom Fahy, the director of legislative affairs for the NWS employees union, said staff members strongly committed to the agency’s lifesaving mission are being pushed “to the breaking point” and that the cuts have “hobbled the agency’s esprit de corpus.”
‘Tornado Alley’ Is Shifting
Scientists are still studying the complex link between tornadoes and climate change. A generally agreed-upon link remains elusive, but strong evidence suggests the warming of the planet also likely increases the potential for severe thunderstorms and, consequently, tornadoes.
In other words, climate change may not be directly increasing the number of tornadoes, but it is affecting the conditions that allow them to develop.
Scientists can say with more confidence that “tornado alley” — traditionally a swath of the central U.S. from Texas and Oklahoma through Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — is shifting eastward.
Now, any land east of the Rocky Mountains is vulnerable to tornadoes, according to Daniel Chavas, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University, wrote for The Conversation. With the shift, tornadoes are occurring earlier in the year and are clustered in larger outbreaks from the Southeast to the Midwest, especially Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana.
At the same time, there hs been a steady and stark decline in tornadoes in the traditional Tornado Alley. Overall, tornadoes have slowed in number over the past several decades but are becoming deadlier with the shift eastward to more populated areas.
“Tornadoes in the Southeastern U.S. are more likely to strike overnight, when people are asleep and cannot quickly protect themselves, which makes these events dramatically more dangerous,” Chavas wrote, adding the tornado that hit London, Kentucky, struck after 11 p.m.
The geographic shift is “perhaps the most concerning trend” in recent decades, Bob Henson, a meteorologist and journalist based in Boulder, Colorado, wrote for Yale Climate Connections.
Citing a 2018 study, Henson wrote tornadoes have become more frequent over the last 40 years in an area from roughly Louisiana to Missouri eastward, especially south of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi, and west of the Appalachians.
“Many of the deadliest and most destructive tornadoes of the 21st century have occurred in that particular region, including those in the catastrophic Super Outbreak of 2011 as well as more recent disasters such as the Tennessee tornadoes of 2020 that caused billions in damage and killed 28.”
The shift eastward puts more people and property at risk at a time when forecasting offices are short-staffed
“When you have this kind of threat and you’re understaffed at some point, something’s going to slip through the cracks," Uccellini told The AP. “I can’t tell you when it’s going to happen.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
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