The Muni Brief: What's the Weather Going to Be?

Key Takeaways:

• Weather forecasting sits at the federal level, funded through NOAA and the National Weather Service on a budget of roughly $6.6 billion.
• There is no line item called “weather forecasting” in a state budget. The cost is spread across emergency management, transportation, utilities, and water agencies.
• It is a national effort that flows down to state and local governments, who service their residents against winter storms, hurricanes, agriculture, and drinking water.

Welcome back to The Muni Brief, a series on municipal credit and markets. In each installment, Senior Municipal Strategist James Colby examines current events, policy developments, and fiscal trends through the lens of the muni investor, covering topics both local and national.

What's the Weather Going to Be?

Everyone wants to know: what's the weather going to be? It is the most ordinary question there is. Yet the answer runs through one of the more layered pieces of public finance in the country. From the extreme to the sublime, from the moment-to-moment pinpointing of dangerous events to the recognition of multi-decade trends impacting the survival and sustainability of millions, societies require a real commitment to managing weather outcomes. Just how we do it here in America combines both public finance and science.

There Is No Line Item for the Weather

Weather is, as the broadcast stations like to say, hyper-local. But its impact can be Continental. Look through any state budget and you will not find a heading that reads “weather forecasting.” The spending is real, but it is scattered. It lives inside emergency management agencies, departments of transportation, utilities, and water resource agencies, and it changes shape depending on what a given state actually has to worry about.

Most states also fund a Climatological Service Office. Wyoming is the exception. These offices are not federally mandated. Each one is created and paid for by the state itself or by a host institution, usually a land-grant university. Consequently, the economic characteristics of each state can vary the mandate. A smaller state might run a lean analytical team on less than $1 million a year. A large, exposed state might operate several sizable climate offices. Their job is to capture data and turn it into recommendations their constituent municipalities can use, on risks such as winter storms and transportation, flooding, utility strain, hurricanes, wildfires, agriculture, and drinking water for major metro populations.

Forecasting Is Federal. Acting on It Is Local.

Here is the part that matters. The primary forecasting responsibility does not sit with the states at all. It sits with the National Weather Service, which is funded through the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on a combined budget of roughly $6.6 billion a year. That money buys serious hardware: ships, planes, satellites, and supercomputers. It is a national resource, and it produces the local and national outlooks the whole system runs on.

From there, the information flows downhill. NOAA and the National Weather Service feed data to state emergency management agencies, transportation departments, utilities, and water resource agencies. The federal government generates the forecast. The states and localities are the ones who staff the response, harden the infrastructure, and write the checks when a storm arrives. It also connects to the bigger conversations we keep coming back to such as infrastructure, sustainability, and electrification which depends on knowing what the weather is going to do.

Final Thoughts

So, when the question is asked, what's the weather going to be, the answer comes from the contributions of many sources at once. A federal agency does the forecasting. State offices translate it. Local agencies act on it. It is worth appreciating just how much goes on behind the scenes of a question that simple. And, for the muni investor, how much of that quiet machinery sits inside the state and local budgets you underwrite every single day.