The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a statement on Friday evening disavowing a days-old tweet from the National Weather Service that contradicted President Trump over the reach of Hurricane Dorian.
The statement from the NOAA was unsigned and posted to the agency’s website on Friday. It said that 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.”
“From Wednesday, August 28, through Monday, September 2, the information provided by NOAA and the National Hurricane Center to President Trump and the wider public demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama,” the NOAA statement reads.
The tweet from the National Weather Service in Birmingham had said that Alabama would “NOT” be affected by the hurricane, and came after Trump mentioned the state along with several others that he said would be hit by the storm.
Trump has doubled down on his claim that early projections showed the storm heading toward Alabama, and has lashed out at criticism in the media and from meteorologists who noted that weather projections showed the storm tracking farther east.
“The Fake News Media was fixated on the fact that I properly said, at the beginnings of Hurricane Dorian, that in addition to Florida & other states, Alabama may also be grazed or hit,” he tweeted earlier Friday.
The NOAA statement backing up Trump is one of the latest moves the administration has taken this week to defend the president, even as the storm has hit the Carolinas with heavy rain and intense wind after devastating the Bahamas earlier this week.
On Thursday, the White House released a statement from one of Trump’s top advisers on Dorian that said the president was briefed Sunday morning on information indicating the storm could possibly strike Alabama.
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