Every year, Chuck commits to traveling to all62 counties in New York to meet with constituents.
On July 29th, 2024, after a record-setting 20 tornadoes in July 2024, with 10 occurring in just one day, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer launched his push for $30 million in federal funding – a $10 million increase from last year – for the nation’s network of weather monitoring systems, known as ‘mesonets,’ which NY has in every single county. Schumer said that recent severe storms, like the devastating tornado in Rome, show how in the midst of global weather changes, storms can often move, meander, and mystify meteorologists, and that a state-of-the-art ability to track, monitor and inform a forecast matters more than ever to keep Upstate NY safe and prepared for extreme storms.
Schumer said in last year’s budget he was able to secure millions for the Mesonet system and that it will be put to work right now, but he said more is needed to keep pace with the extraordinary weather changes afoot. Schumer said his latest push to increase funding is especially timely, amid new extreme right wing proposals like in Project 2025 and others to dismantle and cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) & the National Weather Service (NWS), saying the NWS “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which would not only risk funding the weather programs people rely on, but also critical weather data getting stuck behind a paywall.