"Hazelton, who has four young kids, said working for NOAA had been a lifelong goal. He flew repeated missions aboard NOAA’s hurricane hunter planes and focused his research on one of the most pressing concerns: hurricanes that intensify suddenly, giving little warning to the public and emergency managers.
“I grew up in Lakeland and Plant City and experienced a lot of hurricanes, so doing modeling and working for NOAA was really a dream,” he said.
While Hazelton was a new federal employee, he’d already been working for NOAA for eight years. During college at Florida State University, he volunteered at the Tampa office for the National Weather Service and then volunteered again at the Virginia Key AOML lab while he was completing his masters degree.
After finishing his PhD, Hazelton dove into work at the Virginia Key lab, where he helped develop a next generation hurricane forecasting model as part of partnership between NOAA and the University of Miami.
The research done by Hazelton and others has helped dramatically improve hurricane forecasts in a remarkably short amount of time, allowing forecasters to now better understand when those
short fuse storms might explode and make landfalls more lethal.
With the cuts, that progress will go away, said Spinrad, the former NOAA administrator.
”Any of the progress that has been made over the last several years, including in reducing the errors in the track forecast of hurricanes, reducing the errors in the intensity forecast, I think it's safe to say that that will be compromised,” he said.
While hurricanes get the most attention here in South Florida, Spinrad said other far-reaching impacts are likely, from delayed seasonal forecasts for farmers to navigation issues for commercial shipping and space weather forecasts that protect GPS satellites."
Short fuse storms mentioned in the above story
Improved track and intensity forecasts make it easier for the public to prepare for hurricanes, but forecasters at the annual Governor’s Hurricane Conference say short fuse hurricanes — that rapidly intensify near land — remain a concern.
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