Email release reveals chaos sowed by President Trumps hurricane tweets

For meteorologists and senior leaders at NOAA, the first week of September 2019 is one they're never going to forget.

Amidst the tumult of Hurricane Dorian and its threat to the United States, President Trump injected himself into the story by warning that several states, including Alabama, would "most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest hurricanes ever." Alabama faced virtually no risk from the storm at the time. After being ridiculed for this errant forecast, the president responded with a White House event where he displayed an official National Hurricane Forecast map with a Sharpie-drawn extension that included Alabama in Dorian's "cone of uncertainty."

The controversy only burned all the brighter when the Birmingham office of the National Weather Service tweeted that Alabama residents had nothing to fear from Dorian (which was accurate). This tweet occurred after the president's tweet about Alabama's risk but was apparently not directly in response to the president. Instead, it came in response to a surge of public inquiries. According to the meteorologist-in-charge of the Alabama office, Chris Darden, his office's phones "started ringing off the hook" with public inquiries and concern after the president took to Twitter.

In response to this sequence of events, NOAA released an unattributed statement on September 6 that rebuked the Alabama forecasters: "The Birmingham National Weather Service's Sunday morning tweet spoke in absolute terms that were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time."

All of this took place during the first week of September. The release of hundreds of emails on Friday night, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by BuzzFeed News investigative reporter Jason Leopold, reveals the confusion and anger last year in the wake of the president's Alabama tweets, Oval Office appearance, and then the NOAA statement.

NOAA communications officials themselves were mystified by their own statement, which was released at the direction of the White House. "You are not going to believe this BULL," Maureen O'Leary, a public relations specialist at NOAA, wrote to a colleague.

In an email on the evening of September 6, the director of the National Weather Service, Louis Uccellini, wrote to Neil Jacobs, the acting director of NOAA about an "upwelling" of upset in the entire weather community due to the NOAA statement. "The mood out there is pretty ugly," he said.