House-approved legislation that would fund the federal government through September would have a "devastating" effect on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency's chief said yesterday.
"The cuts are of a nature that there would be significant hits throughout NOAA's programs," agency Administrator Jane Lubchenco told the House Science, Space and Technology Committee.
Consequences of the cuts could include less accurate long-term and severe weather forecasts and longer response times for marine search-and-rescue operations, she said.
The House-approved spending measure, H.R. 1, would chop $454.3 million from NOAA's operations, research and facilities account. That would slash the agency's total budget to $4.3 billion, down from approximately $4.7 billion in 2010 -- and well below the White House's proposed 2012 budget of $5.5 billion.
The Senate voted down the appropriations bill this week and also nixed a competing plan, leaving no clear path ahead to resolve a weeks-long budget impasse between the two chambers.
Meanwhile, Science Committee Chairman Ralph Hall (R-Texas) made it clear yesterday that he has little sympathy for NOAA's budget woes.
The White House's fiscal 2012 budget request for NOAA "contains few surprises, but several concerns," he said. Among them: NOAA's proposed "Climate Service."
The agency announced its plans to create the climate service last spring, arguing that the new office would create a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation's best sites for wind and solar power -- information designed to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change.
The climate service is at the heart of President Obama's 2012 budget request for NOAA, which calls for a sweeping reorganization of NOAA's climate portfolio.
But that hasn't swayed Hall, who authored an amendment to H.R. 1 that would bar NOAA from spending money during the current fiscal year to implement its climate service plans.
"This committee has not yet had the opportunity to fully examine the implications of transitioning fundamental climate research into an operational office," Hall said yesterday. "Until and unless Congress reviews and approves this proposal, I expect NOAA to continue to operate as it did prior to the February 2010 announcement."
Meanwhile, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) derided the climate service plan as "trendy" and "froufrou."
In response to questions from Hall, Lubchenco said that NOAA began planning the climate service during the George W. Bush administration and "planning continues," but the agency has not started operating a climate service.
Facing a panel stacked with Republicans who are skeptical of mainstream scientific views of climate change, the NOAA chief emphasized she saw a growing demand for the information that a climate service would provide.
"We are getting inundated with requests for information that is months to years to decades out -- not centuries," Lubchenco said. "People want to plan. Water managers or city managers or farmers are trying to evaluate what they should do to plan for the next year."
Science panel Republicans also took aim at NOAA's plans for its collection of weather and climate satellites.
The White House's fiscal 2012 budget request seeks $2 billion for NOAA's environmental satellite division. Just over $1 billion of that would be set aside for the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), a weather and environmental satellite program formed out of the scraps of a defunct joint effort between NOAA and the Air Force.
According to NOAA, JPSS will provide 98 percent of the raw data for the agency's weather model and is crucial to the agency's hurricane forecasts, climate predictions and ability to assist with search-and-rescue operations. But the satellite program's progress has been threatened by the series of continuing budget resolutions that have kept the federal government's lights on since October.
NOAA needs -- but has not received -- $910 million for JPSS during the current fiscal year, Lubchenco told lawmakers.
She said: "I fully appreciate what a large number that is, but the consequences of not having it are very severe. For every dollar we do not spend this year on this program, it will cost us three to five dollars in the future to build this program back up."
Operating under temporary spending measures for the last five months has already delayed JPSS by at least a year, Lubchenco said.
"What that means is that down the road, we will inevitably have a gap where we will not have the ability to do severe storm warnings as we do them today," she added. "It is highly likely we will have a gap. The longer we wait, the longer that gap gets."
Hall questioned why NOAA was spending money to developing JASON-3, a joint mission with the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites to monitor sea level rise, while its JPSS coffers were running dry.
"You know that you can't have both," Hall told Lubchenco. "Don't you need to prioritize in this economy? I think weather is, by any reasonable person, more important than sea-level change. We can't have everything we want."
