John Morales on What We're Missing
South Florida's longest-tenured meteorologist on disappearing data, stronger storms, and why we need to meet people where they are.
Few people know more about extreme weather and hurricanes than John Morales. Over the last three decades as a broadcast meteorologist in Miami, he’s been the voice South Florida turns to when a storm is coming. If you’re not a local, you might recognize him from a moment that went viral in 2024, when he choked up on air while reporting on Hurricane Milton’s rapid intensification into a Category 5 storm.
So for people who aren’t familiar — how did you end up in meteorology?
Most people know me from my time in media. I served as chief meteorologist at three different television stations in the Miami market — including 18 years communicating about weather and climate in Spanish at Univision and Telemundo, and then at NBC 6 starting in 2009.
But my career started well before TV. I’m from Puerto Rico. I remember tracking tropical storms and hurricanes on paper charts that they used to hand out at the hardware store or at pharmacies, and I would keep all these statistics about the storms. Fall of my senior year [of high school], a big hurricane just missed Puerto Rico and then made a right turn into the Dominican Republic and killed thousands. It was an awful tragedy. I think that was the clincher. I said, I want to pursue studies in this.
Nobody knew how to orient me. Most Latino families like mine — when you’re smart and do well in school, they want you to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer. But my mom, who raised me as a single mom, put me in touch with professionals in Puerto Rico who could guide me. I got a mentor — the director of the National Weather Service office in San Juan. I worked summers in his office while studying at Cornell, and when I graduated in 1984, they found a way for me to start my career as a federal civil servant at NOAA and the National Weather Service.
These days, I do forensic meteorology — reconstructing past weather events for litigation, whether it’s an aviation accident, a marine incident, or insurance cases. I also continue communicating about weather and climate through Climate Power, where I’m Co-chair of Campaigns.
We’ve come along way from tracking hurricanes with paper sheets. How different is the technology now?
When I was a high schooler in the late ‘70s, we had satellites, weather radar, hunter aircraft, ships reporting weather, land-based stations — all of that existed. But now, 50 years later, it is so improved. The granularity of the data is so much more dense. And if we can improve the way we monitor the weather, then logic tells you we’ve gotten better at forecasting it too.
Over the last 50 years, those advances have been accelerating, and our ability to save lives and protect property has definitely increased. But over the last year or so, we may have lost some ground.
What do you mean by that?
The cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service have been devastating. If you look at the statistics of forecast accuracy for tropical cyclone tracks and intensities from the National Hurricane Center, they were off in 2025. And anecdotally, I’m not the only meteorologist who will tell you that day-to-day forecasting has become more challenging. The weather models are flip-flopping from one solution to the next.
Think about how many times TV meteorologists in the fall of 2025 had to show you two or three models with different solutions and say, “Well, this is what this model says, but yesterday it was saying something different.” That leads to more confusion among the public — and it makes our job of saving life and property more difficult.
We’ve been missing 15 to 20 percent of our weather balloon data. And those missing balloons are upstream — out West, in the Plains, in the Intermountain West, and especially in Alaska. That’s where our weather comes from. We’re no longer able to really know what’s going on out there. And nothing provides the detail weather balloons can: every 15 feet, all the way up to 100,000 feet.
The Trump regime’s philosophy seems to be: if you can’t count it, if you can’t observe it, then there are no changes happening. Because we can’t see it anymore.
And all of this is happening while the weather itself is getting more extreme.
Right. We know the direct connections. Stronger hurricanes, because a greater proportion of tropical cyclones are attaining catastrophic status thanks to warmer oceans. Droughts develop with more ease because temperatures accelerate transpiration — soils and vegetation dry out faster. Then the whiplash: when it finally rains, it rains harder than ever because the atmosphere holds more water vapor. And heat waves are becoming stronger, deadlier, and more frequent.
There’s also the jet stream, which is getting weaker. A weaker, wavier jet stream allows Arctic air to spill down into the continental US with greater ease. That’s what happened in Texas in 2021, when people ended up hypothermic in their own homes because the power failed. This winter, the eastern half of the country has been in the right spot for repeated cold outbreaks, and people with recency bias think it’s unusually harsh. But it’s more like a normal winter — it just feels extreme because the last 20 winters have been warmer than they used to be.
Meanwhile, the West has had one of its warmest winters on record. A colleague in Phoenix told me their first 90-degree day was around the corner — in February. I don’t care if you’re in Phoenix. 90 in February is not normal.
[Think about] the ratio of record highs to record lows across the US. In a normal climate, you’d see about the same number of each. Instead, it’s running two-to-one, three-to-one, some years four or five-to-one in favor of record heat.
How do you talk about this with people who are skeptical — or just tuned out?
One of the biggest concerns is that degraded forecast capability leads to over-warning. If we’re not sure where a hurricane is going because of missing data, we end up warning more of the coast than necessary. And that erodes trust.
I made sure early in the 2025 hurricane season to prepare my audience. I showed an example of me being very confident about Hurricane Dorian’s forecast in 2019 — how it would turn, how Florida didn’t need to worry. And then I said: I’m not sure I can do that this year. I prepared people for the possibility that I couldn’t confidently make an accurate forecast.
The black swans and gray swans are starting to happen.
There’s also a deeper issue. We’re seeing outlier events — things we never thought we’d see — because of climate change. There’s a paper I like to cite that argues surprise is an unavoidable component of weather and climate disasters, and that we must learn to expect it. The black swans and gray swans are starting to happen. Now combine that with a degraded ability to monitor and forecast. That’s an incendiary mix. People’s lives are in danger because of what’s happening right now.
What’s your advice for regular people trying to prepare for all of this?
First, know that sometimes the worst does happen. People factor their life experiences into decisions about whether to take action, and if they’ve never lived through a major hurricane, they have no idea. You hear what people’s last words were to authorities who came to evacuate them: “I’ve lived here 30 years and nothing ever happened. I’m not leaving.” But the element of surprise needs to be taken into account. You cannot lean so much on your life experience.
I often say: one of these days, there’s going to be a mundane tropical storm in the central Bahamas, and 36 hours later it’s going to make landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Miami. How do people prepare for that level of surprise? That’s how hurricanes work today. They’re different, and we are to blame.
So: forget life experiences. Be ready for surprises. Listen to the scientists and listen to the authorities.
Do you think we have the solutions? And if so, why aren’t we acting on them?
We have to meet people where they’re at. We can’t be throwing textbooks at people’s heads — especially in today’s America, where for whatever reason, people see scientists as elitist. Everyone has their own opinion and thinks they know better because they can “do their own research.” Tom Nichols wrote about this in The Death of Expertise. Carl Sagan predicted it in The Demon-Haunted World
So if this is the America we’re living in, then experts like me need to find ways to relate to people that they won’t find intimidating. We need people to internalize and personalize the threat — whether it’s a pandemic, a hurricane, or a wildfire. And one way to do that is to talk about their families, their immediate world. Because often in today’s America, people aren’t seeing beyond their front door. If that’s what it takes — relating to this individual and their partner and their children — then so be it.
I’m also a trustee at Cornell, and of course universities have been under attack. We have to help people realize the benefits that research brings to society — from a better way to build a bridge, to a more fuel-efficient vehicle, to improved weather forecasting. These advancements, funded in large part by the federal government over the past 80 years, have benefited American society in ways we wouldn’t have otherwise.
People need to realize that it is important to have scientists. It is important to do research — basic and applied — to make us better, more efficient, to help us live longer. We can do better if scientists are trusted more.
John Morales is the longest-tenured broadcast meteorologist in South Florida, with over three decades in the Miami market, including 18 years in Spanish-language media and 13 years as chief meteorologist at NBC 6. He now runs Climadata, a forensic and consulting meteorology firm, and serves as Co-chair of Campaigns at Climate Power. You can follow him on most platforms @JohnMorales.