PORTLAND, Me. — LAST week the National Weather Service’s satellite network crashed, leaving forecasters without crucial data as a large nor’easter swirled across the East Coast, dumping record levels of rain and leaving thousands of residents without power.

This network shutdown was the latest in a string of failures that has left the agency unable to meet the needs of the nation. Earlier this year, the service’s website collapsed under the weight of data requests from a single Android app. A month earlier, the service’s severe-weather alert system also crashed, creating a major disruption to communication that left residents from Colorado to the mid-Atlantic without key radar and warning information while a string of severe storms swept over their region. And in 2011, the National Weather Service website experienced what one official called a series of “catastrophic failures” just as a massive blizzard marched across the eastern half of the country.

Each of these instances revealed just how fragile our national weather program really is, and how desperately we need to invest significantly more in the weather infrastructure, technology and the kind of communication redundancies that will keep all of us safe.

This is not a new problem. For years, congressional allocations to the National Weather Service have all but flatlined. Meanwhile, the cost of storm recovery has skyrocketed. In the 20 years leading up to Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the United States suffered 133 weather disasters that exceeded $1 billion in damages, for a total of over $875 billion. Sandy, the second-costliest hurricane in the nation’s history, came with a price tag of an estimated $65 billion.