On Tuesday afternoon, the risk of wildfire in northeastern Colorado had risen high enough that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility company, announced that it would shut down power in much of the area the following day. Expected high winds, combined with the current dry conditions, meant that a downed electrical line could spark a catastrophe. Local institutions responded by announcing closures yesterday, among them the Boulder, Colorado–based National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR.
Shortly after the Xcel announcement, USA Today broke the news that the Trump administration planned to “dismantle” the center. Climate scientists know NCAR as one of the largest weather-and-climate-research institutions in the world; Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, described it as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” NCAR had already reduced its staff in anticipation of drastic budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, which provides about half of the center’s funding. In March, a major NCAR project meant to track hurricanes and other severe storms was canceled after the administration pulled back money appropriated for it. Now efforts to dissolve the center would begin “immediately,” USA Today reported, and would include a full closure of the center’s Mesa Laboratory—whose distinctive rose-hued towers, designed by I. M. Pei, have overlooked the city since the 1960s. (The Office of Management and Budget did not immediately return a request for comment.)
On Tuesday night, Antonio Busalacchi, the president of the consortium that operates the center, was in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union along with many of the center’s researchers. Busalacchi issued a brief statement acknowledging the reports but noted that “we do not have additional information about any such plan.” That’s essentially still true: At a press availability at the conference today, Busalacchi said, “I don’t want to be facetious, but I don’t know what the best definition of ‘immediate’ means.” He defended NCAR’s work, which would be more costly if it was broken up, he said, as well as the impartiality of its researchers. “We are physical scientists. We’re not political scientists,” he said.
Like many of the institutions and agencies targeted by the Trump administration this year—USAID, the Forest Service, the National Institutes of Health—NCAR is vulnerable in part because so few Americans know what it does, if they’ve heard of it at all. Established in 1960 to advance the field of meteorology, which had flourished during World War II but languished in peacetime, the center was designed to coordinate research on “the problems of the atmosphere” and provide the large-scale computing facilities necessary for that work. It now employs more than 800 researchers and makes its facilities available to thousands more each year.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University and the chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, called NCAR “quite literally our global mothership.” Daniel Swain, a UC Agriculture and Natural Resources climate scientist known for his commentary on extreme-weather events, hosted a “rapid response” livestream yesterday morning. “Most academics in the weather and climate world,” he said, “have in some way passed through or connected with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.” Swain, himself a research partner at NCAR, spoke to his audience from Boulder, warning that the area’s planned power shutoff could bring his report to an abrupt end. He described the administration’s plans for NCAR as “a genuinely shocking self-inflicted wound.”
Whether or not Americans know it, research at the center has contributed to enormous advances in the weather forecasts they consult each day. Three-day forecasts have been more than 80 percent accurate since the 1980s and are now about 97 percent accurate; five-day forecasts hit the 80 percent threshold in the early 2000s, and seven-day forecasts are approaching it today. NCAR researchers have also enabled more precise predictions of tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, and other extreme events. The center has been so successful, Swain observed during his livestream, that we now take for granted “the fact that we are not caught by surprise when a hurricane makes landfall, the fact that we can predict the occurrence—literally, as I speak, the winds are picking up outside the window—of these extreme fire-weather conditions.”
The dissolution of the center could disrupt climate science and its applications in more fundamental ways, interfering with access to the center’s supercomputer facility in Wyoming, the cross-disciplinary collaborations essential to climate science, and recent partnerships with insurance companies and other businesses whose profitability depends on a predictable climate. An NCAR employee who was laid off because of funding cuts earlier this year, and who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the Trump administration, told me that the worst effects of these disruptions might not be immediately apparent. “The gaps we’re going to have in our science and technology research in the next decades are what you’re really going to notice,” the former employee said.
Vought told USA Today that although the National Science Foundation “will be breaking up” NCAR, “vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.” Yesterday, the NSF stated that it would “explore options” to put the center’s modeling and forecasting powers toward “seasonal weather prediction, severe storms, and space weather.” (Reached today, the NSF had no further comment.) White House officials characterized the dismantling of NCAR as a return to the center’s original mission—to make the weather great again, so to speak, by separating weather forecasting from research on climate change.
Weather and climate aren’t easily separable, though, and never have been. Weather, after all, is essentially a snapshot of the climate: same atmosphere, shorter timescale. The massive computer models that climate scientists now use to predict future changes in the global climate arose from the weather-forecasting models that NCAR researchers began to help build and refine in the 1960s. As researchers added power and complexity to these models, running them for longer periods and including the effects of ocean temperatures, volcanic activity, seasonal ice and snow cover, and other factors, they began to approximate the climate. NCAR’s newest climate model, the Model for Prediction Across Scales, or MPAS, can simulate both large-scale atmospheric patterns and small-scale weather events.
Today, predicting the weather without considering the climate would be meteorological malpractice. Human-caused changes in the global climate have fundamentally changed the weather, making extreme conditions not only possible but also more likely. Without ongoing research on climate change, forecasters would be less able to predict deadly weather events such as last week’s flooding in the Pacific Northwest and heavy snow in the Midwest and Northeast.
And they might not have seen the Colorado winds coming in time for electric utilities to take preventive measures. Swain signed off his livestream yesterday as the wind picked up in Boulder. By noon, Xcel Energy had shut off power to nearly 100,000 of its Colorado customers. By 4 p.m., the weather station at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory was measuring wind gusts of more than 100 miles per hour.
