Forced closure of premier US weather-modeling institute could endanger millions of Americans
On Dec. 16 2025, the Trump administration announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) — one of the world’s leading weather and climate research centers. In a statement to USA Today, Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said NCAR is “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.”
But dismantling NCAR could seriously impact the nation’s capacity to ensure public safety and its ability to protect economic stability, Holly Gilbert, the institute’s interim deputy director, told Live Science. “The research we do here directly applies to protecting the public,” she said.
For example, taking a flight used to be a riskier endeavor. Pilots encounter an abundance of challenges — from turbulence and tornadoes to ice on wings and rapidly varying pockets of wind known as microbursts. But thanks in no small part to the research conducted at the NCAR, flying has become safer, helping pilots avoid these hazards: There hasn’t been a single crash on a commercial airline caused by sudden, sharp changes in wind speed in more than 25 years.
But the center’s impacts stretch well beyond aviation safety. NCAR models help forecast tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, extreme heat, drought and the potential for wildfires. “Whenever there has been an early warning, NCAR science and models have been part of bringing that warning to the people who need to hear it,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, told Live Science.
Swain, a research partner of NCAR, also stressed that without these early warnings, people could lose their properties or die unnecessarily in weather-related disasters.
NCAR also partners with insurance and reinsurance industries to assess the risks these hazards pose to lives and property. “NCAR provides leading weather research that helps keep people safe and protect homes, businesses, and jobs,” Nicole Austin, senior vice president and director of federal affairs at the Reinsurance Association of America, told Live Science in an email. “Its long-term studies of hail and wildfires, along with real-time weather data, help reduce damage and help communities recover faster after disasters.”
One center, multiple impacts
NCAR’s models currently save the national aviation system an estimated $27 million annually. For terrestrial disaster resilience, NCAR’s WRF-Hydro system powers the National Water Model (NWM), which monitors flood risk for more than 2.7 million stream locations.
NCAR has also developed GPS dropsondes—packages of instruments, tethered to little parachutes, that measure atmospheric conditions. These dropsondes reduced hurricane track forecast errors by up to 30%. Modern economic analyses estimate that such improvements in forecast accuracy save the nation up to $2 billion per major storm by optimizing protective decisions and reducing unnecessary evacuations.
NCAR also engages with private entities such as The Weather Company, which operates key digital consumer brands like The Weather Channel and Weather Underground. “Our proprietary forecasting capabilities — which are vital to national safety and security, economic resiliency, and aviation efficiency — greatly benefit from the basic and applied science and technology produced at NCAR and widely used across the entire weather enterprise, including directly at The Weather Company,” Peter Neilley, senior vice president of science and forecasting operations at The Weather Company, told Live Science in an email.
NCAR’s models also forecast phenomena beyond the weather. Its Wildland Fire model simulates how wildfires create their own weather, giving first responders critical on-the-ground intelligence, while its Fire INventory from NCAR (FINN) model tracks toxic smoke transport, alerting health officials to air quality hazards thousands of miles downwind.
NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory (HAO) also anticipates threats to U.S. infrastructure from events originating in space, such as geomagnetic storms. Predicting space weather is essential for safeguarding the nation’s power grid, GPS satellites and communication networks from solar flares that can trigger widespread blackouts and equipment failure.
Greater than the sum of its parts
A statement from the NSF said it “is reviewing the structure of the research and observational capabilities” of NCAR and will “explore options to transfer stewardship” of several of its strategic projects “to concentrate on needs such as seasonal weather prediction, severe storms, and space weather.”
But the unique value of NCAR lies in its capacity to treat Earth as a single system, where all the different components — the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and water — are connected to one another, Gilbert said. “Risks to public health and safety are inherently complex and multidisciplinary,” she said, “which makes it important to have the expertise and capabilities in one organization to look at where the Earth systems come together.”
Modeling the path of a catastrophic wildfire, for example, takes more than data around the fuel available and local wind patterns; it requires simultaneously tracking how heat from the fire creates its own violent, localized winds and determining how multi-year drought has desiccated the fuels. Understanding the public health impact also requires modeling how the resulting toxic smoke will travel. NCAR’s expertise is unique because it ensures that the intertwined components of fire, air temperature, dry land, water availability and air quality are modeled simultaneously using shared tools and computational resources, Gilbert said.
The complexity and interconnectedness of these types of disasters means that splitting the center into multiple distributed research locations could have serious consequences, Swain said.
Different areas of research at NCAR used to be structurally siloed, but they’ve evolved to be more integrated and better suited to addressing complex environmental challenges, Swain said. To better understand weather, you have to understand it in the context of climate, he said. “Otherwise it is like being an emergency room doctor without access to 20% to 40% of a patient’s health records.”
Returning to siloing would be akin to disassembling the central operating system from a custom, high-performance car and distributing the components to three different mechanics. Each part might function individually, but the dismantling process would impact the ability to drive the vehicle at high speeds safely, Gilbert said.
In a similar vein, splitting up NCAR would hinder the capacity to predict highly complex, multi-hazard events.
“Looking at individual parts is not nearly as important as looking at this integrated system,” Gilbert said. NCAR researchers look at the “whole” using established observation, modeling and computational resources and drawing on multiple partnerships established with industries and universities. “It would be so costly to pull these pieces apart,” Gilbert added.
