John Morales (2:38)

My audiences have always known me as the just the facts non alarmist meteorologist.

Dina Temple Raston (2:46)

Which is why it landed so hard. When John sounded the alarm last June about the future of forecasting, the guy who doesn't do hype suddenly went viral. He was telling the world that something fundamental about the skies we all share is changing.

John Morales (3:04)

What we're starting to see is that the quality of the forecasts is becoming degraded.

Dina Temple Raston (3:09)

I'm Dena Templerest and this is Click Here, a podcast about the people making and breaking our digital World Today. Grab your umbrella. Because we're setting off on a story that starts in the clouds and ends in code. Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how we forecast the weather, catching storms sooner, warning us faster. But there's a catch. All that progress runs on streams of data. Balloons, satellites, sensors, all paid for with government budgets that are now on the chopping block. So what happens when innovation surges ahead just as the ground beneath it begins to give way? It's like asking a runner to break a world record while tying their shoelaces together.

Amy McGovern (3:56)

We're on the verge of making so many amazing technologies available. AI is going to do great things and can help us. But if I cut off your arm, how are you going to do things that require two hands?

Dina Temple Raston (4:09)

Stay with us.

Recorded Future News Announcer (4:13)

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to TheRecord Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.

Dina Temple Raston (4:44)

From Recorded Future News. This is. Click here. John Morales didn't set out to track hurricanes. For him, it all started with baseball.

John Morales (4:58)

I was a Santurce crabbers fan, the Canrejeros de Santurce. This is the team where Roberto Clemente played and many other greats.

Dina Temple Raston (5:11)

As a kid in Puerto Rico, he'd sprawl on the floor, pencil in hand, copying box scores from the evening paper. And once every last stat was tallied, he'd turn the page from balls and strikes to storms.

John Morales (5:26)

You know, in the 70s, mainly, you know, before Internet, you would get these hurricane tracking charts that would either be inserts in the local newspaper or you could go to the hardware store and grab one of them.

Dina Temple Raston (5:40)

John began sketching out storms, building his own weather reports by hand.

John Morales (5:45)

I would take down all kinds of information. What the barometric pressure was, what the trends were, what direction was it moving, what was the expectation?

Dina Temple Raston (5:56)

He took that obsession to Cornell, where he studied meteorology and began entering weather forecasting contests.

John Morales (6:03)

I won a couple of times, a couple of semesters, I actually came out victorious.

Dina Temple Raston (6:13)

He went on to work at the National Weather Service. He won Emmys. He spoke at the White House about climate change. But most of his career he spent at the local NBC affiliate in Florida, where for the past three Decades. He's become the voice Floridians trust. When the clouds start to churn.

Katie Drummond (6:32)

Meteorologist John Morales is joining us now to break it down for us.

John Morales (6:35)

John, hi, good afternoon to both of you. And indeed the advisory is in. This is still a formidable hurricane, now ranked as the second strongest hurricane.

Dina Temple Raston (6:46)

For a long time. All the math that went into a weather forecast was done by hand, which meant predictions took days, sometimes weeks, and they were often wrong. Then came NOAA satellites, radar, computers, and they managed to do in hours what once took humans days. What do you think people understand least about being a meteorologist?

John Morales (7:10)

I think most people have a preconception, if you will, that we're wrong half the time. And that's really pretty far from the truth. These days. We're right about 85% of the time and wrong 15% of the time. That's a pretty good bagging average.

Dina Temple Raston (7:34)

In fact, a four day forecast today is as reliable as a one day forecast was 30 years ago. Even so, John's superpower isn't just reading the models. It's in making the weather tangible. What it feels like to stand in the driving rain or bracing against gale force winds.

John Morales (7:54)

I try to make people understand what the howling wind would sound like. Try to understand what they would have to do if the wind was starting to damage some of the parts of their home and where to go and what your safe room could be.

Dina Temple Raston (8:11)

Last year, during Hurricane Milton, the most powerful cyclone of the season, that calm cracked.

John Morales (8:19)

It has dropped, it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours. I apologize. This is just horrific.

Dina Temple Raston (8:37)

Millibars are how meteorologists measure air pressure, the weight of the atmosphere pressing down on us. In a healthy system, pressure stays steady. But in a hurricane, falling millibars mean the storm is getting worse. And a drop of 50 millibars in just 10 hours, well, that's off the charts. And in that moment, John couldn't hide the weight of it. Normally, John Morales makes a point of being the island of calm in the storm. But moments like that, those flashes of humanity, are part of why John has become so beloved.

John Morales (9:14)

I've become a person that's not just a weatherman, not just a meteorologist. I am almost a trusted family member that folks go to for advice when it comes to preparing for hurricanes.

Dina Temple Raston (9:34)

So when he tells his audience to worry, they know it's time to worry. And this year, John is about as worried as he's ever been. Not just about hurricanes or cyclones, but about a different kind of storm. And that's where we're headed next. Stay with us.

Katie Drummond (10:12)

What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview Conversations are fun.

John Morales (10:39)

I want a shark that.

Katie Drummond (10:40)

That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.

John Morales (10:45)

So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.

Katie Drummond (10:52)

To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me. One day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Dina Temple Raston (11:25)

This is Click here. Last spring, John Morales stepped onto a stage where the future of weather was up for debate.

John Morales (11:37)

There was a summer community meeting coming up for the American Meteorological Society, and they had asked me to be a panelist on it. And part of what we were going to be discussing was potential threats to America's weather enterprise, which involved the society.

Dina Temple Raston (11:56)

Meets a few times a year. And if you flip through the program for last year's event, you'd find dozens of panels circling one technology in artificial intelligence. AI, it turns out, is doing for weather what it's doing for everything else, making sense of chaos.

Amy McGovern (12:14)

Because there's so much uncertainty in the atmosphere, we don't have the ability to sense everything that's happening.

Dina Temple Raston (12:20)

This is Amy McGovern. She's a computer science and meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Amy McGovern (12:26)

And one of the things that AI is really good at is because it can give you an answer so quickly, you could do something like a thousand different instantiations and see what's the most likely answer out of all of this.

Dina Temple Raston (12:38)

There are a bunch of big tech companies trying their hand at forecasting weather with AI. One system has already been praised for beating traditional hurricane forecasts, sometimes predicting a storm's path four or five days before landfall. But broad accuracy is one thing, and pinpointing flash floods or sudden microbursts is another. And those are often the storms that matter most. To help AI systems improve, researchers have been feeding models more than just wind and temperature data. They've been adding in greenhouse gases, ocean chemistry, air pollution. Think of it as giving the system a broad education in earth science before sending it to grad school to specialize in hurricanes or air quality. Which brings us Back to Amy McGovern. In addition to studying how AI works with weather, she also leads the NSF's AI Institute, which focuses on making these tools reliable enough to use in real world forecasting. And she says when it comes to weather, AI's superpower is making sense of huge data sets really quickly, as opposed.

Amy McGovern (13:51)

To a physics based model that would take you a very long time on a very large supercomputer. And so by the time you got your answer, the event will be over.

Dina Temple Raston (13:59)

And when it comes to weather speed matters, the difference between a few hours and a few days can actually save lives.

Amy McGovern (14:06)

A typical weather numerical weather prediction model, it takes a very long time. So it gives you a 24 hour forecast, but it takes about an hour to give you that new forecast. The add model can give you two in a second or two.

Dina Temple Raston (14:17)

That's a huge leap. But Amy McGovern is quick to point out AI has blind spots. For one, it doesn't actually understand physics. The calculus equations that govern storms, they don't come naturally to an algorithm, which leads to some head scratching results.

Amy McGovern (14:35)

Things like you can't negatively rain, which should be obvious like if it's either raining or it's not, it's not sucking wean out of the atmosphere. But an AI model doesn't know that, right?

Dina Temple Raston (14:48)

Negative brain. Try carrying an umbrella for that. But the real concern isn't the absurd mistakes. It's that AI learns from the past and the past doesn't look much like the present anymore.

Amy McGovern (15:01)

How do you predict the extremes if the extreme has never happened before?

Dina Temple Raston (15:05)

And then there's the biggest hurdle of all, data. Because even the smartest AI is useless without the streams of information that feed it. And as John was preparing for that weather conference we mentioned before, he realized those streams of data aren't guaranteed.

John Morales (15:23)

In preparation for this panel, I learned a lot about Project 2025.

Dina Temple Raston (15:29)

Project 2025 now one of the blueprints for the Trump administration. And buried inside of it was a plan that stopped John Cold.

John Morales (15:39)

Project 2025 explicitly says that NOAA is to be well dismantled because the excuse was that NOAA is a climate alarmist agency and that it has no business doing that.

Dina Temple Raston (15:56)

And therefore NOAA is Unique. No other country has anything quite like it. And it's the backbone of modern forecasting, collecting and distributing nearly all the weather data that scientists, governments, and companies around the world depend on. But Project 2025 calls for gutting it. The National Weather Service, the satellites, the research centers, the entire system that weather forecasting relies on. And while the conference buzzed about AI's dazzling promise, John saw something no one seemed to register. That the very flow of data itself, the satellites, the sensors, the models, could soon be at risk. And then John's worst fears came true.

Katie Drummond (16:42)

All right, we're getting some breaking news that we've been following over the last hour, with the Trump administration official confirming that about 5% of the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are being let go.

Dina Temple Raston (16:52)

That agency includes NOAA's budget is set to fall by 27% in 2026, which won't just compromise weather stations, but the agency's research centers, its aging satellites, even the hurricane hunters who fly into the center of storms to measure how quickly they're intensifying. And then there's one of the most surprising and most vital tools for forecasting the weather balloons.

John Morales (17:19)

Well, it's not a party balloon, okay? I would say it's the size of a very small compact, like a Mini Cooper or a Fiat 500. Right?

Dina Temple Raston (17:35)

Even in the age of AI, the future of forecasting still rises on a thin skin of latex and a pocket of helium. If you've never seen one launched, picture this. An overcast morning in the parking lot of a squat brick weather station. A technician in a crisp white Polo National Weather Service emblem stitched over the pocket, steps outside, cradling what looks like a bundle of limp latex. Eventually, it'll swell to the size of the car John Morales talked about. After that, we launch the balloon. It gets to about 100,000ft, takes 90 minutes to pop. This is the ritual every single day at hundreds of stations across the globe. Scientists walk out into the elements, sometimes rain, sometimes heat, sometimes abiding cold, to release these giant, gleaming white orbs up into the sky.

John Morales (18:29)

3, 2, 1, go. The two times the balloons are released are an hour hour before noon and an hour before midnight.

Dina Temple Raston (18:42)

And dangling beneath each one, an instrument about the size of a grapefruit, climbing, climbing until it vanishes into the clouds, quietly sending back a stream of data that will help shape tomorrow's forecast.

John Morales (18:57)

The weather balloons carry an instrument that is delivering weather data. Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind direction, and wind speed as it rises up to 100,000ft in the atmosphere.

Dina Temple Raston (19:12)

As it Ascends, it beams back everything it sees. A live high resolution snapshot of the skies above until the moment, sometimes hours later, when the balloon finally bursts.

John Morales (19:24)

In meteorology, there are no political boundaries. So whether it's Russia or Saudi Arabia or South Africa, everybody is releasing their own set of weather balloons. And this is what allows us to paint a picture of what's going on in the atmosphere.

Dina Temple Raston (19:42)

There's something kind of romantic about it, isn't it, that all these people come out at the same time all over the world and release these Mini Cooper sized balloons out into the atmosphere.

John Morales (19:53)

The mere fact that there is this level of cooperation internationally, right? The fact that they know that this international collaboration is going to lead to better results for everybody, because we're going to.

Dina Temple Raston (20:05)

But lately those snapshots are disappearing. The budget cuts have reduced weather balloons by nearly 20%, erasing enormous swaths of data.

John Morales (20:17)

I've seen some of the maps of where these gaps are. So for example, you look at the, at the Northern Plains and the Intermountain west, and there's huge gaps there with no data whatsoever.

Dina Temple Raston (20:30)

Patchier data means patchier forecasts. Forecasts people rely on whether to plan or picnic or to evacuate a home. As with many of President Trump's recent cuts, the thinking seems to be that private companies could do it better. Amy McGovern isn't so sure.

Amy McGovern (20:49)

Which company is going to put in several hundred million dollars per radar to cover the United States in radar data? Which company is going to put in several million dollars of ground based observations to get precipitation and temperature at a really fine scale across the United States? The air quality, all of that, all of that data is all collected inside.

Dina Temple Raston (21:08)

Noaa and all of it is used. And the private companies who are trying to innovate around weather tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia and Google, their AI models won't work without the data. No. So with that man made storm brewing, John Morales did something he almost never does. Sounded the alarm.

John Morales (21:29)

So June 2nd was a Monday. It's the first weekday of hurricane season.

Dina Temple Raston (21:35)

That night, he began his forecast with a story from the past, an old broadcast from 2019, when it seemed that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Florida. John predicted it would turn back out to sea.

John Morales (21:49)

As you've grown accustomed to my presentations over my 34 years in South Florida newscasts, confidently, I went on TV and I told you it's going to turn. You don't need to worry, it is going to turn.

Dina Temple Raston (22:04)

And it did. It turned. Then he said something you never want to hear. Your weatherman say, and I am here.

John Morales (22:11)

To tell you that I am not sure I can do that. This year.

Dina Temple Raston (22:19)

He laid it all out. The cuts, the data gaps, the layoffs.

John Morales (22:23)

Did you know that Central and South Florida National Weather Service offices are currently basically 20 to 40% understaffed from Tampa to Key west, including the Miami office? 20 to 40% understaffed.

Dina Temple Raston (22:38)

And then looking straight into the camera.

John Morales (22:40)

This is a multi generational impact on science in this country. I just want you to know that what you need to do is call your representatives and make sure that these cuts are stopped.

Dina Temple Raston (22:53)

The broadcast went viral. He'd struck a nerve not just in Florida, but across the country. Because weather is the most universal human experience, people expect to glance at their phones and trust the forecast. And that's John's point. Weather data isn't just a convenience, it's a lifeline. There are glimmers of hope. NOAA has announced plans to rehire hundreds of meteorologists and technicians. Public agencies and private companies are working to plug the gaps. And even citizen scientists are pitching in, collecting hyperlocal data in places NOAA can't always reach. But until the system is back at full strength, forecasting will remain at risk. Because weather isn't just numbers on a screen. It's a shared story of survival, of trust, of adaptation. And right now, that story is shifting not just in the clouds above us, but in the halls of power. Which means there's a choice to make. We can surrender to fragmentation, or we can build resilience with AI human expertise, volunteers, scientists, lawmakers and communities working together. The forecast doesn't have to be just about storms. It can be about hope. This is quick here.

Recorded Future News Announcer (24:42)

If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up the day's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication the Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to the Record Media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.

Dina Temple Raston (25:10)

Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories from the past week. It's Tuesday, September 23rd.

John Morales (25:18)

Some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize.

Dina Temple Raston (25:23)

Jimmy Kimmel is off the air after he talked about Charlie Kirk's murder in the one of his monologues. The alleged shooter's motives remain unclear, but Kimmel took aim at the administration's rush to politicize the case and cracked a few jokes at Trump's expense. A couple of days later, ABC suspended him indefinitely. Though it wasn't just the network acting on its own, the FCC chair warned broadcasters that they could face punishment for airing Kimmel's show. And the crackdown on opposing views doesn't stop there. The DOJ has removed an academic study.

Katie Drummond (25:58)

And data from its website which indicate.

Dina Temple Raston (26:00)

The government's own conclusion that the number of far right attacks continues to outpace all other types of domestic violent extremism. In the wake of Kirk's killing, Trump administration officials have painted homicide as a left wing problem. But a study from the Justice Department's own research arm tells a different story. Or at least it did. It found that since 1990, there have been 42 lethal far left attacks and more than 200 coming from the far right. That study, well, it vanished overnight. Initially, it was replaced by an apology notice, and then that disappeared, too. A literal deletion of history, reminiscent of George Orwell. A haunting and terrifying vision of what.

Advertisement Voice (26:46)

The world might become, a world of absolute conformity.

Dina Temple Raston (26:50)

There is truth and there is untruth. What are your true feelings towards Big Brother? Once upon a time, Nvidia was a little startup in the video game industry. Now it's the world's most valuable company, and it's teaming up with a rival, intel, to work together on AI and data center chips.

John Morales (27:09)

Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion into Intel.

Dina Temple Raston (27:14)

The deal comes weeks after President Trump announced that the US government was taking a 10% equity stake in intel, making Uncle Sam one of the company's biggest shareholders. This new partnership, Nvidia insists Washington kept its hands off Wisconsin has opened its doors to a new $4 billion data center.

John Morales (27:36)

Microsoft has become a trusted partner that.

Recorded Future News Announcer (27:39)

Is integrating into our community.

Dina Temple Raston (27:42)

Microsoft is pouring a whopping $7.3 billion into two two data centers that will house Nvidia's most advanced chips, promising 10 times the performance of today's supercomputers. The latest site will sit on land once promised to Foxconn's ill fated factory. This time, locals are worried about water and electricity, and Microsoft says it will prepay energy bills and tap solar farms to blunt the impact the centers might have. But when the future of AI arrives in your backyard, it tends to leave a footprint.

John Morales (28:17)

And finally, this is Meta Ray Ban display.

Dina Temple Raston (28:23)

Mark Zuckerberg is still chasing the Metaverse. At Meta's annual conference, he unveiled $799 smart glasses with wristband controls and a lens screen and a voice AI boss.

Amy McGovern (28:36)

WhatsApp video call.

John Morales (28:38)

There we go. Uh oh.

Dina Temple Raston (28:40)

Unfortunately for Zuck, not one but two live demos failed on stage.

John Morales (28:47)

That's too bad. I don't know what happened.

Dina Temple Raston (28:50)

Zuckerberg blamed the WI fi. The audience applauded anyway. The dream of overlaying the Internet onto the physical world lives on, apparently, even if it doesn't always work.

Erica Gaeda (29:17)

Today's episode was written and produced by Dina Temple Raston, Sean Powers, Megan Dietrich, Zach Hirsch and me, Erica Gaeda. I was the lead producer. The episode was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ankrum and contains original music by Ben Levingston, but some other music from Blue Dot sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Jesse Nice Wonger and Jake Cook do our sound design and engineering. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Tune in on Friday for Mic Drop, which features our favorite interview of the week. We'll see you then.

Dina Temple Raston (30:01)

Foreign.

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Recorded Future News Announcer (31:06)

Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on? Click here. Then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others. And you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.