February 17th, 2011 7:39 AM

Proposed National Weather Service cuts would affect Calera, Huntsville and Mobile offices

Published: Thursday, February 17, 2011, 5:30 AM     Updated: Thursday, February 17, 2011, 6:02 AM

As Alabama approaches its peak tornado season and its hurricane season, proposed funding by Congress could slash the budget of the National Weather Service by nearly one-third.

A continuing budget resolution proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday would force work furloughs and rolling closures for 27 days at a time of the National Weather Service's 122 Weather Warning Offices across the United States -- including those in Calera, Mobile and Huntsville, said Dan Sobien, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.

"We're talking people's lives when they cut the Weather Service," Sobien said. "We've always gotten support from Congress in the past. This is the first time they've pulled the rug out from under us."

Sobien said the proposed cut would be $126 million over six months. The Weather Service has a budget of about $800 million to $900 million for the entire year, he said.

"In the next hurricane, flood, tornado or wildfire, lives will be lost, and people will ask what went wrong," Sobien said.

Sobien represents about 4,000 non-management Weather Service employees.

Jim Stefkovich, the meteorologist-in-charge for the Calera office, said he was waiting to see the numbers and could not speak for the Weather Service.

"We've gotten no information at this point," he said.

Sobien said leaders at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration worked through the weekend to figure out how they could absorb such a cut.

Besides the furloughs and temporary office closings, cuts could be made in a variety of programs that are crucial to weather forecasting models and the monitoring of severe weather. These include surface buoys that measure wave height, automated surface weather stations, the twice-a-day balloon flights that probe the upper air to provide crucial data for computer weather models, a wind profile network used by the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., to forecast tornado and severe thunderstorm threats, and weather satellites.

The National Hurricane Center also could see cuts, as could river flood warning programs.

Sobien said hurricane forecasting would be set back a decade, and the quality of tornado warnings would be eroded if the cuts were made.

He also warned that decreased accuracy of weather forecasts would be costly for airlines and people who travel by air, as well as for farmers.

Efforts to get comment from the National Weather Service were unsuccessful Wednesday.

The continuing resolution, H.R. 1, introduced Friday by the House Appropriations Committee, would cut spending by more than $100 billion from the president's fiscal year 2011 request.

A news release from the committee said, "This CR legislation represents the largest single discretionary spending reduction in the history of Congress."

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