Bradenton meteorologist backs colleagues targeted by Trump administration

Sep. 10--A Bradenton meteorologist has been one of the leading voices raising concerns about political influence over a key federal science agency after a controversy involving President Donald Trump, Hurricane Dorian and the National Weather Service.

Dan Sobien is a meteorologist based in the National Weather Service's Ruskin office who also serves as the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union representing about 4,500 federal employees scattered from Alaska to Guam and American Samoa.

But it is the National Weather Service office in Birmingham, Alabama, that has been in the news recently after the office put out a tweet on Sept. 1 as Hurricane Dorian was approaching the east coast of Florida.

The tweet stated that "Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east."

The NWS tweet contradicted one sent earlier in the day by Trump stating that "In addition to Florida -- South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated."

Since then, the Trump administration has spent a significant amount of time defending the president's assertion that Alabama was in jeopardy, even going so far as to alter a National Hurricane Center map with a black Sharpie pen to show Alabama in Dorian's potential path.

The controversy escalated on Friday when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- which oversees the National Weather Service -- put out a statement supporting Trump and contradicting the NWS office in Birmingham.

"The Birmingham National Weather Service's Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time," reads the unsigned NOAA statement.

Sobien was among the first to react to the NOAA statement, which has generated an uproar among current and former employees of the federal science agencies.

The Bradenton meteorologist learned about NOAA's apparent efforts to undermine its own employees on Friday evening from multiple texts and emails. He then checked a union Facebook page and realized "people were very angry." Sobien said he felt he had to respond, so he took to Twitter.

"Let me assure you the hard working employees of the NWS had nothing to do with the utterly disgusting and disingenuous tweet sent out by NOAA management tonight," Sobien tweeted Friday.

His tweet has 62,400 likes and has been retweeted 17,100 times.

Having investigated the issue, Sobien is confident that "what the Birmingham office wrote was absolutely correct; there was no chance of Dorian impacting Alabama" at the time Trump tweeted.

"Yet NOAA sent that out and completely undermined their own forecasters and the confidence in the forecast and it had a terrible effect," Sobien added.

The issue is vitally important because confidence in the work of federal meteorologists -- who warn the public about severe weather ranging from hurricanes to tornadoes and blizzards -- is a life and death matter, Sobien said. If people don't trust forecasters, they might not heed their warnings.

"That could cost people's lives if there's no confidence in our warning system," Sobien said.

The last few days have been a whirlwind for Sobien. He has done multiple media interviews and was in Washington, D.C., on Monday to brief congressional staff on the issue.

On Monday, the head of the National Weather Service, Louis Uccellini, also expressed support for the Birmingham office.

According to the Washington Post, Uccellini "got a standing ovation at a major weather industry conference in Huntsville, Alabama, when he broke with his bosses at NOAA by enthusiastically backing his agency's forecasters regarding their performance during Hurricane Dorian."

"They did what any office would do," Uccellini said. "With an emphasis they deemed essential, they shut down what they thought were rumors. They quickly acted to reassure their partners, the media and the public -- with strong language -- that there was no threat."

Uccellini and Sobien both emphasized that the Birmingham office wasn't aware that concerns about Dorian hitting Alabama were being driven by Trump's tweet.

The employees were simply responding to an "onslaught" of public inquiries, Sobien said.

"Without knowing about the tweet, I guess the Birmingham office began fielding a whole bunch of questions and calls," Sobien said. "It was just an onslaught, and so the Birmingham, Alabama, office put out a tweet saying there's not going to be any impact from the hurricane on Alabama."

Craig McLean, the acting chief scientist for NOAA, also weighed in Monday, saying he is investigating the statement put out by NOAA rebuking the Birmingham office.

"The NWS Forecaster(s) corrected any public misunderstanding in an expert and timely way, as they should," McLean wrote in an email to employees obtained by the Washington Post. "There followed, last Friday, an unsigned news release from 'NOAA' that inappropriately and incorrectly contradicted the NWS forecaster. My understanding is that this intervention to contradict the forecaster was not based on science but on external factors including reputation and appearance, or simply put, political."

Sobien has worked at the NWS office in Ruskin since 1994.

"I have been in the federal government for 28 years and I have never seen anything like that," he said of NOAA's apparent efforts to undermine its own employees.

"It's imperative ... that people respect the authority, that they're getting the best information that they can and it's not politicized," Sobien said. "There really is no place for politics in science."

___

(c)2019 Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Fla.

Visit Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Fla. at www.heraldtribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.