Trump picks former chief entangled in ‘Sharpiegate’ to lead Noaa

Donald Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, turning to the man who was his acting Noaa chief in 2019 when Trump altered an expected hurricane impact map in what became known as the “Sharpiegate” scandal.

After Alabama meteorologists had contradicted an earlier Trump tweet warning of the state being in a storm’s path, the Jacobs-led agency chastised them. That eventually drew criticism of Jacobs and his political higher-ups in a Department of Commerce inspector general’s report on Sharpiegate.

Noaa oversees the National Weather Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Ocean Service and other offices. Along with many other federal agencies, Noaa was targeted in Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for change in a second Trump administration. That document called to “break up Noaa”, criticizing the agency as “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.

Jacobs is a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, where he has spearheaded efforts to combine different computer forecasting systems for weather and climate into a single system. He was chief atmospheric scientist at Panasonic Avionics Corporation and is a fellow at the American Meteorological Society.

His appointment was first reported by Axios.

In 2019, when Hurricane Dorian was bearing down on the US east coast, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center gave it a zero or minimal chance of hitting Alabama. But then President Trump tweeted the state “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated”.

Forecasters in Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted: ”Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.” They said they didn’t know about the president’s tweet at the time and were responding to worried residents.

Dorian never made landfall in the United States, skirting the coast of North Carolina, and had no major impact on Alabama, about 600 miles (965km) away.

Three days after Dorian’s landfall, Trump displayed an earlier National Hurricane Center warning map that had been altered with a black marker to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm. The president is known for his use of Sharpies.

Political back-and-forth went on for days, often in the early hours of the morning, according to the inspector general’s report. That included one text at 1.08am that said the commerce secretary wanted “a chronology of who said what about Alabama from first briefing to the last”, followed by a 2.30am phone call to Jacobs that went unanswered. A Jacobs aide sent a 3.48am email with a chronology.

Jacobs told the inspector general that “things went crazy in the middle of the night” and that when he woke up to read all the messages his “anxiety level went through the roof”. He said some of the suggested statements from his bosses “doesn’t sound like something I want my name on”.

The next day, Jacobs’ agency issued an unsigned statement saying the Birmingham weather office’s statements “were inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time”.

Days later, Jacobs went to a meteorologists convention in Alabama and, appearing almost in tears, thanked the criticized Birmingham forecasters, saying: “No one’s job is under threat – not mine, not yours.”

He later added: “Weather should not be a partisan issue. I’ve known some of you for 25 years. I haven’t changed. I’m the same Neil I was last Thursday,” referring to the day before the Noaa statement was issued.

The commerce department’s watchdog agency blasted agency and department leaders over Sharpiegate, saying they “unnecessarily rebuked [National Weather Service] forecasters for issuing a public safety message about Hurricane Dorian in response to public inquiries – that is, for doing their jobs”.

A 2020 outside report from a group of academics was also critical of Jacobs over the incident. At the time, Noaa’s acting chief scientist, Craig McLean, criticized the lack of discipline against Jacobs and his communications chief.

“While there may be found causes of sympathy for the oppressed and meek subordinates of domineering autocratic ogres, I hardly can find sympathy in this scintilla of an argument for clemency,” McLean wrote. “If not the single highest person in Noaa, who will stand for the scientific integrity of the agency and the trust our public needs to invest in our scientific process and products?”

Despite that history, Jacobs drew support last month from several weather professionals at the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans. They told the Associated Press they hoped Trump would bring Jacobs back to lead Noaa, especially compared with some other rumored choices.

“I think the Neil Jacobs appointment is a strong pick,” Victor Gensini, a professor of meteorology at the Northern Illinois University said.

Jacobs also attended the convention. In a session about his main project – the unified weather forecast system – he recounted to his fellow meteorologists how he had testified a few years earlier at a congressional hearing on a bill reauthorizing Noaa.

Jacobs said then that there was bipartisan support for what the meteorologists were doing. “All they did was say how awesome it is, how important weather forecasting is for the country,” Jacobs said. “If you read the news and don’t watch that [hearing] you wouldn’t believe that ever happens in DC.”