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National Weather Service Director Ken Graham was caught moonlighting Thursday night. Not only is he not in trouble for it, but he plans to do it again.
In a bid to get closer to the forecasters at his agency and keep his skills sharp, Graham became the first Weather Service director to work an operational shift, according to spokeswoman Susan Buchanan. His shift Thursday night at the Baltimore-Washington forecast office in Sterling, Va., included helping generate the weather forecast, canceling a coastal flood advisory and writing portions of a forecast discussion.
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“An unsettled pattern is expected early next week,” Graham wrote in the discussion of the forecast for the Baltimore-Washington region. “This will bring some rain chances through the middle part of the week to the area.” He plans to return to the Sterling office, about 30 miles west of Washington, Friday night and may launch a weather balloon.
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Graham sees these late shifts as an opportunity to engage directly with the “front-line” forecasters. “This is a way for me to not just work the midnight shift, but it is to talk to the forecasters on duty,” Graham said in an interview. “What are the great things going on? What are some of the challenges? I want to hear it from them.”
Graham is no stranger to working in the forecasting trenches, having previously served 10 years as the meteorologist-in-charge at the Weather Service office that serves New Orleans. He first joined the Weather Service as an intern in 1994, making him the only director to have started at the agency as an intern. Graham is the “first director with the skill set to produce an actual NWS forecast,” Buchanan said.
Yet for Graham, working the overnight shift is about more than just helping push out a weather forecast. He also sees it as an opportunity to understand firsthand the daily pressures on forecasters who endure grueling shifts amid increasing bouts of extreme weather. The United States has experienced a record 24 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year, according to NOAA.
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“I remember those pressures, working the long hours, midnight shifts and everything. It is a tremendous amount of pressure. It is incredibly stressful,” he said. “The dedication of the NWS workforce never ceases to amaze me, and it sure amazed me tonight.”
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Stress is one of several workforce challenges Graham inherited when he became Weather Service director in June 2022, after holding the same position at the National Hurricane Center for four years. Over 80 percent of agency employees who responded to a 2022 survey said they felt some form of burnout in the past year. “Excessive workload” and “difficulty balancing personal responsibilities” were among the most cited reasons.
The survey followed a 2017 report by the Government Accountability Office that linked stress, fatigue and reduced morale among Weather Service employees to understaffing. Vacancies across operational units had increased from 5 percent of the total number of positions in 2010 to 11 percent in 2016. While the vacancy rate has since declined to 5 percent as of the most recent pay period, according to figures provided by Buchanan, Graham remains concerned about worker retention.
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Graham highlighted supporting employees as his top priority when he was introduced as Weather Service director. At the time, agency forecasters across the country had worked long hours and rotating shifts through an extremely active period of weather during the pandemic. “The rotating shifts are really hard,” he said. “It is hard on the body, it is hard on family, it is really hard to have balance in life in that situation.”
One of his major goals is to develop and implement a new approach to operations that allows for more sharing of workload and flexibility in scheduling. Graham also wants to create more opportunities for forecasters to work directly and be located with emergency managers and others who make tactical decisions based on the forecast.
“Coming in and just manipulating data to get a forecast, that is not the job satisfaction the next generation” is looking for, Graham said. “They really want to be on the front lines” and “be with the decision-makers,” he added. “They want the excitement, they want the flexibility, and I can’t retain them until I can build that.”
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