July was the hottest month on record in the contiguous United States, with an average temperature of 76.9°F—the highest average ever recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), going back to 1895. The previous record was shared by July 1936, during the Dust Bowl, and July 2012. Every state was at least 1 degree above its 20th-century average.
This type of observation can help communities prepare for and respond to extreme heat events. They can then take informed steps to prevent serious health issues that the World Health Organization (WHO) links to high temperatures, like heat stroke and cardiovascular disease, or even death.
But NOAA relies on federal funding in order to keep historic records, observe weather patterns, and produce informed forecasts.
The Trump Administration reduced NOAA’s workforce in 2025, and subsequently proposed steep cuts to the agency’s funding, hampering its ability to monitor weather conditions, analyze patterns, and provide forecasts.
The National Weather Service (NWS), which operates under NOAA, lost roughly 600 employees—about 15% of its workforce—through layoffs, buyouts and retirements. It must now respond to increasingly severe weather events—like hurricane season and wildfire season—with reduced resources. As a result, it announced last year that it was scaling back the tools used to track weather patterns, such as weather balloons.
The administration later proposed cutting NOAA’s overall budget by $1.6 billion, or roughly 26%, compared with fiscal year 2025.
“A leaner NOAA that focuses on core operational needs, eliminates unnecessary layers of bureaucracy, terminates nonessential grant programs, and ends activities that do not warrant a Federal role, will provide better value to the American public,” its budget summary stated.
The United States will likely continue struggling to reconcile diminishing resources with increasing extreme temperatures, as the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned Tuesday that periods of extreme heat will become more frequent, intense, and longer-lasting as climate change warms the planet.
How we know when heat is becoming dangerous
The NWS tracks weather in multiple ways—including the installation of surface stations at over 900 airports that provide 24/7 real-time surface weather observations, as well as weather balloons, marine buoys, and satellites.
Those observations feed forecast models that help meteorologists understand developing weather patterns and anticipate dangerous conditions.
“Extended periods of high day and nighttime temperature conditions create cumulative stress on the human body, increasing the risk of illness and death from heat exposure,” according to the WHO. In the United States, the NWS considers heat the leading weather-related killer. Globally, studies estimate that heat was associated with roughly 489,000 deaths annually between 2000 and 2019.
The health effects of heat waves were felt acutely this summer. Maryland’s Department of Health said that 2026 was its deadliest heat season on record, with a total of 50 heat-related fatalities since May. The state also recorded over 1,300 heat-related illnesses in that period. At the national level, the Washington Post reported that there were at least 70 deaths related to heat domes in July. And in Europe, officials said that there were more than 10,000 excess deaths during the continent’s record-breaking heat wave in June.
The NWS communicates the danger that high temperatures pose using a Heat Index that describes the “feels like” temperature to the human body based on a combination of heat and humidity. For consistency, it uses what’s called “apparent temperature,” referring to the temperature that the body “feels” in shady locations. Exposure to direct sunlight can increase values by up to 15°F.
With information from the NWS, local governments are better able to prepare infrastructure and warn vulnerable communities. At the same time, the agencies are better equipped to create and distribute useful resources, such as guidance on how to stay cool during heat waves.
But less accurate data, and less data collected overall, can prevent experts from accurately anticipating future events. Agencies might be less prepared to inform vulnerable communities or cooperate with local and state governments to ensure outreach and preparedness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this is more likely to impact people with chronic medical conditions, children, and adults over 65.
What happens when weather agencies have fewer resources?
Cuts at NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have left the U.S. more vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather.
In May, for instance, lawmakers expressed concerns over the NWS’s failure to launch 75% of the weather balloons typically sent aloft in Kansas to help measure atmospheric conditions. These balloons carry a device called a radiosonde that is used to collect upper-atmosphere temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind information to support forecasting. NWS blamed staffing shortages, but Kansas Rep. Sharice Davids pointed out that those disruptions were occurring during tornado season.
“Kansans deserve transparency about what’s happening, why it’s happening and what’s being done to fix it,” Davids said in a statement. “Kansans deserve confidence that the systems meant to keep them safe are fully operational during tornado season and meteorologists deserve the reliable data they need to do their jobs.”
In order to preserve its work with fewer resources, NOAA has continued to evolve its use of technology. It has long used artificial intelligence and machine learning for “weather forecasting, climate modeling, and environmental monitoring.” And it announced a partnership with Google Cloud in July, explaining how the move is expected to “result in a modeling system that is more flexible and easy to update.”
That same month, China debuted Fenghe, an open-source large language model (LLM) for meteorological services. The government announced that the LLM “is trained on 50 million tokens of meteorological service data and integrated with authoritative weather datasets to support weather forecasting, risk assessment, and meteorological services.”
As NOAA faces an uncertain funding future, such tools could become increasingly important to its efforts to maintain forecasting capacity for an increasingly hot planet.