Trump plans to break up NCAR, a critical climate and weather research center : NPR

President Trump references a map as he speaks to reporters about Hurricane Dorian on September 4, 2019. The map appears to have been altered with a black marker to extend the reach of the hurricane to include Alabama.

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The White House is considering dismantling a key weather and climate research center in Colorado, a move that experts say could compromise the accuracy of forecasting and forecasting systems.

It’s the latest climate action by President Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, cut funding for climate research, and removed climate scientists and meteorologists from their positions in the federal government. During his first term, Trump contradicted the National Weather Forecast Service by redrawing the path of Hurricane Dorian on a map with a Sharpie.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought announced plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder in an article on Tuesday, calling it “one of the biggest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” NCAR was founded more than sixty years ago to provide universities with expertise and resources for collaborative research on global weather, water and climate challenges.

Vought said the center was undergoing a “comprehensive review” and that all “vital activities such as weather research would be moved to another entity or location.”

Antonio Busalacchi, who heads the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of 129 U.S. universities that oversees the Boulder facility, told NPR that he received no notice before the announcement and believes the decision “is entirely political.”

NCAR’s job is to study both climate and weather, and Busalacchi says the two cannot be understood separately. “Our job is to define what science is, and it’s up to others to interpret what that science means,” he says. “We are very careful not to cross the line into advocacy or policy prescription.”

Plan faces political backlash

Vought’s announcement drew an immediate response from Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, who said in a statement that if the White House pursued the plan, “public safety would be at risk and science would be under attack.”

Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, and Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat whose district includes Boulder, have suggested that the proposed NCAR shutdown amounts to brinkmanship by the White House in response to Colorado’s refusal to release Tina Peters. Peters, a former Mesa County clerk, is serving a nine-year prison sentence for illegally accessing voting machines after the 2020 election. A Republican, Peters was recently pardoned by Trump, a largely symbolic action since she was neither charged nor convicted in federal court.

“The judgment is that a lot of it is Tina Peters,” Bennet told local Colorado media. And that the president tried to get his way through intimidation and failed and is trying to punish Colorado accordingly. » In a joint statement, Bennett, Neguse and U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the administration’s plan “deeply dangerous and clearly retaliatory.”

NPR reached out to Vought’s Office of Management and Budget but received no response. The White House press office did not respond to specific questions, including whether NCAR’s “dissolution” meant its closure. But in a statement, the White House said NCAR’s “activities fall far short of scientifically sound or useful,” adding that the center was being dismantled “to eliminate research activities on the new green scam.”

American Meteorological Society President David Stensrud says he has used NCAR weather models throughout his career. “I think the work I and others have done has led to the improvements we are seeing [in] …the weather forecast,” he said. “Losing that [will cause] a lot of trouble in terms of our ability to continue to improve forecasts and the future. »

The “beating heart” of climate and weather science

Among NCAR’s many contributions, in the 1960s it developed dropsondes – tube-shaped instruments dropped by aircraft, including hurricane hunters, to measure temperature, pressure, humidity and wind. In the 1980s, the center helped develop and refine technologies to monitor wind shear at airports.

Busalacchi says these efforts have contributed to decades without passenger plane accidents caused by wind shear or downbursts. “We have had no loss of life from these weather events that can be directly attributed to our research. And that’s what we’re talking about losing” if NCAR shuts down, he said.

NCAR, which employs approximately 830 people, is also known for developing and maintaining tools such as the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, used around the world to predict everything from thunderstorms and large-scale systems to hurricanes and frontal systems. NCAR’s Community Earth Systems Model (CESM) is also widely used by scientists, including Jason Furtado, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma.

Furtado says he and his colleagues used the model to conduct experiments “to investigate where in the atmosphere and ocean we receive long-range signals for outbreaks of extremely cold air,” such as the February 2021 event that hit the middle of the country, leading to subzero temperatures for days and the complete blackout of the power grid in central Texas. “We used [CESM] and do some really important research,” Furtado says.

He calls NCAR “a globally envied research center for atmospheric science” and “the beating heart of the atmospheric science community.” He says his research and that of many other scientists simply wouldn’t be possible without the Boulder center. “In one way or another, all atmospheric scientists have a connection to NCAR, whether they visited the building directly or not,” he says.

Ken Davis, professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Penn State, conducted research at NCAR from the time he was a graduate student until the end of his postdoctoral fellowship. He says NCAR plays a critical role in providing its members with cutting-edge computing, observational resources and scientific expertise “that no single university can provide alone.”

“If an investigator anywhere in the country wants to request a research aircraft … NCAR will look at that proposal and say, ‘Yes, we can do that,’” Davis said. “As a university researcher, I can show up with an instrumented C-130 [aircraft] doing a whole bunch of airborne research, which would be completely impossible without this facility to support the community. »

This is not the first time the Trump administration has found itself at odds with the scientific community. In April, the administration fired scientists working on the nation’s flagship climate report, then removed the report from a government website.

In 2019, Trump found himself embroiled in a scandal known as “Sharpiegate,” in which he contradicted the National Weather Service’s official forecast for Hurricane Dorian by insisting that the storm directly threatened Alabama. He then displayed a map of the Oval Office showing a modified storm track that appeared to have been drawn with a black marker. Earlier this year, the Senate approved the nomination of Neil Jacobs, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official cited for misconduct related to the episode, to head the agency.

In its 2026 budget plan, the White House also proposed cutting NOAA’s budget by about 27% and eliminating NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, the agency’s primary climate and weather research arm. The administration also cut funding to the National Science Foundation for climate science.

Ultimately, closing NCAR would not have an immediate impact on weather forecasts, Furtado says. Instead, he said, it would slowly erode the scientific community’s ability to make further progress in understanding weather and climate.

“We can either accept the facts and work on ways to mitigate and adapt, or we can ignore the data and not be ready for the changing world we live in,” says Furtado.

“Having less accurate forecasts and being more in the dark about what’s coming puts lives and property at risk,” he says.