Trump's Plan to Shutter Weather Center May Leave Forecasters 'Flying Blind'

TEA Party Trump is going to save America from climate change by ignoring it.  Way to go, Bozo!

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Atmospheric scientists are stressing that a Trump administration plan to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado would be a mistake that could leave forecasters "flying blind."

Alarm was felt across the weather industry this week following reports that the Trump administration planned to rip apart NCAR, a federally funded research center in Boulder, Colorado, focused on climate research, weather forecasting and environmental studies.

On Tuesday night, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought called the facility "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country" when he posted to X that the National Science Foundation (NSF) would be "breaking up" NCAR. The news comes after widespread budget cuts slashed staffing at numerous federal agencies earlier this year, including at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS), spurring concerns that storms could become more deadly without the proper staff to issue forecasts and warnings.

"A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location," Vought wrote in the post.

When reached for comment, a senior White House official implied that the move to break up NCAR was a result of Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis' leadership.

"Maybe if Colorado had a governor who actually wanted to work with President Trump, his constituents would be better served," the official told Newsweek, although a reason for how Polis influenced the decision was not provided.

The White House criticized NCAR as a hub for "left-wing climate lunacy," citing programs such as the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences, which was dismantled in January; an art series called Exploring Water Through Art; research into wind turbines; and an experiment conducted in 2014 regarding air pollution as evidence that NCAR was wasting taxpayer dollars.

NCAR's vital functions like weather modeling and supercomputing will remain operational, although they will be moved under the purview of another entity or to a new location, the White House said, adding that the goal of dismantling NCAR is to "eliminate Green New Scam research activities" conducted at the facility.

A public statement from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which manages NCAR, said it was aware of the Trump administration's plans for NCAR but that it had no "additional information about any such plan."

"NSF NCAR's research is crucial for building American prosperity by protecting lives and property, supporting the economy, and strengthening national security," the statement said. "Any plans to dismantle NSF NCAR would set back our nation's ability to predict, prepare for, and respond to severe weather and other natural disasters."

Newsweek reached out to UCAR's media relations manager via email and phone for comment.

Breaking up NCAR would "lead to a substantial slowdown in work on improvements in weather forecasting," Steve Decker, director of the Meteorology Undergraduate Program at Rutgers University, told Newsweek, as widely used research models to improve weather forecasting are produced by NCAR. These impacts would take years to be felt, Decker said, but others would be more immediate.

NCAR also "carries the data flow from weather stations, radars, satellites, you name it, to our computers so that we have an understanding of what the weather is doing," Decker added.

"I believe many folks in private sector companies, and even the NWS, rely on that infrastructure, so everyone would be 'flying blind' to some extent," he said. "It's so fundamental and so embedded in the weather enterprise that I don't know if anyone really knows how blind everyone is going to be if the plug is pulled. These impacts on infrastructure could start to be felt immediately."

Newsweek also reached out to NOAA, which oversees the NWS, via email for comment.

Jeff Basara, atmospheric scientist and department chair at University of Massachusetts Lowell's Environmental, Earth and Atmospheric Science Program, told Newsweek it would be a "mistake" to dismantle NCAR.

Basara has visited NCAR in Boulder dozens of times over the past three decades. He said its work runs the gamut from severe weather to turbulence and includes fire weather, flash flood research, forecast model development and more—tools that are used by or would have impacts on the NWS, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and other federal agencies.

"There is no question that impacts on NCAR are going to have ... cascading impacts to all those other agencies and their mission to protect life and property," Basara told Newsweek.

For example, Basara said that NCAR was researching the major flash flood that occurred along the Guadalupe River in Texas over the summer, a horrendous tragedy that resulted in more than 100 deaths, many of them children. He detailed other projects under NCAR's scope, such as the significant loss of life and flooding effects from Hurricane Helene in September 2024, and Maui's Lahaina Fire in August 2023.

"Those are the types of projects they're working on to understand the mechanisms and ... what do we need to know so we can have better warnings that go out in the future," Basara said. "NCAR is doing the research to help understand the mechanisms so the operational folks can have that information and get that out better.

"Losing that link on the science side impacts the ability to provide more timely and advanced information down the line to protect lives and property."