It powers the computer models that forecast hurricanes, track wildfire smoke, and project rising sea levels and floods. Now, the federal government plans to dismantle it.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, a world-renowned laboratory of the National Science Foundation, faces an uncertain future after a surprise announcement on Dec. 16. The news was delivered not in a formal policy document but on social media, where the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget posted on X that the administration will break up NCAR, citing it as a source of “climate alarmism.” The announcement did not explain what will replace the centralized facility that develops knowledge and tools for weather prediction, an area that underpins major sectors of the economy, safeguards communities, and trains future scientists. On Jan. 23, the NSF issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” to partners and the research community announcing a call for proposals to take over managing some parts of NCAR’s infrastructure and equipment, with proposals due March 13.
“Dismantling NCAR would essentially be taking a wrecking ball to America’s weather-monitoring and research infrastructure.”
Scot Miller
Whiting School of Engineering
The prospective reconfiguration of NCAR arrives at a time when severe weather is becoming more frequent, disruptive, and expensive, with billion-dollar disasters now striking the U.S. roughly once every two weeks. The announcement sounded an alarm for the meteorologists, astrophysicists, and planetary scientists who rely on NCAR for their research and realize the critical role it plays in protecting lives.
“This is a terrible move to make at any time, particularly now that we’ve just had the third hottest year on record and need to better grasp what’s coming our way,” says Julie Lundquist, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Wind Energy at Johns Hopkins University. “Like many atmospheric scientists in the U.S., I consider NCAR the single-most vital resource for scientists working to understand and predict Earth’s atmosphere and weather. Losing NCAR would kneecap our ability to do important work to understand severe storms, flash floods, drought, air quality, wildfires, and weather prediction.”
Nearly 900 scientists and engineers work at NCAR’s main facility in Boulder, Colorado, but researchers and meteorologists from across the country use its tools and resources not just to advance science but also to inform airlines, farmers, maritime shippers, city planners, construction workers, local governments and communities, and emergency preparedness systems. The potential loss of all of this worries Scot Miller, an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering.
“Dismantling NCAR would essentially be taking a wrecking ball to America’s weather-monitoring and research infrastructure—one that would be very difficult to undo and potentially set us back decades in our ability to forecast weather and to protect the U.S. from extreme weather events,” Miller says.
Image credit: WILL KIRK / JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Lundquist and Miller serve as JHU’s representatives to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR, the board that currently manages NCAR. There, they represent the concerns of the many scientists and students at Johns Hopkins who rely on the center. Their roles build on a six-decade precedent, harkening back to the center’s creation in 1960, when a consortium of universities—including Johns Hopkins—banded together to build a shared national laboratory for the atmosphere. The idea was both simple and radical: pool resources so the country could understand and monitor the air above it, at a scale no single campus could undertake.
Today, the national and international research community regards NCAR as the world’s preeminent laboratory for atmospheric sciences. It houses state-of-the-art observational platforms, simulation tools, modeling capabilities, and supercomputers that U.S. scientists compete to access by writing proposals to the National Science Foundation. The setup makes sense, given that “individual universities and scientists can’t afford to buy these platforms and tools themselves,” Lundquist says. “They don’t have aircraft hangars and can’t buy planes decked out with scientific instruments, but they can access aircraft operated by NCAR or use NCAR’s surface meteorological stations and sounding facility.”
While some airplanes monitor weather systems, others measure air pollutants and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere—two focal points for Miller, whose lab at Johns Hopkins identifies the sources and distribution patterns of potent emissions. One of his studies, for instance, uncovered that Texas and Oklahoma collectively account for a quarter of U.S. methane emissions, largely owing to leaky oil and gas operations in those states, he says. And a study underway now examines emissions of methyl bromide, a pesticide that destroys the ozone layer, causes cancer, and has largely been banned worldwide.
“Methyl bromide emissions from the U.S. are going down, but they’re not zero,” Miller explains. “Most of the remaining emissions come from California, likely because of its unique agricultural industry and outsized role in the international shipping of agricultural products.”
For her own research, Lundquist uses a simulation tool known as the Weather Research and Forecasting Model, or WRF, supported by NCAR, to probe interactions between the atmosphere and energy infrastructure. Meteorologists have long used WRF to predict storms and understand atmospheric dynamics, but Lundquist utilizes it in her lab to understand atmosphere-wind energy interactions and predict how air pollution flows through complex urban environments.
Image credit: WILL KIRK / JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
A key advantage of WRF, she says, is that it’s a living model that NCAR scientists continually update based on feedback and findings from its many users, along with developments in artificial intelligence. Isolated models hosted by single universities can’t match that level of refinement and capability, she says.
Beyond research, Lundquist uses NCAR’s models and supercomputers in courses she teaches. This semester, she is teaching Johns Hopkins’ students to use NCAR’s supercomputer Derecho, named after the powerful windstorm. Derecho can perform as many as 19.87 quadrillion calculations per second, and more than 4,000 scientists use it to analyze solar storms, air pollution, wildfires, and other weather-related phenomena. Earlier in February, however, the National Science Foundation announced that it would move the management of Derecho, currently housed at NCAR’s facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming, to an unnamed third-party operator.
“NCAR facilities are staffed with top-notch, interdisciplinary scientists and engineers, and with a third-party operator, the chance of being able to walk down the hall and talk to a world expert on, say, turbulence in the atmosphere and how it might affect airplanes—that chance is zero,” she says.
These plans leave professors like Lundquist in the lurch, and she worries about the gap the dismantling of NCAR will create in training the next generation of atmospheric and oceanic scientists. Much of her own training took place at NCAR, she says, and the center offers year-round opportunities for students, postdoctoral fellows, scientists, and engineers.
Miller is equally concerned about the downstream effects on the economy.
“Many people take weather forecasting for granted and think it’s only useful in planning the day,” he says. “In reality, accurate and reliable weather models and data inform schedules and logistics for airlines, fisheries, planting and harvesting, construction and mining, maritime shipping—the list goes on. All of these are vital to our economy.”
They also shape military planning, preventing the kind of surprise that hit Allied pilots during World War II, when B-29 crews in the Pacific were thrown off course by high-altitude “superwinds” that turned out to be jet streams—air currents that NCAR scientists now routinely monitor.
For Lundquist and Miller, the move to dismantle NCAR isn’t merely about who will oversee a supercomputer or manage a fleet of research aircraft. It’s about whether the country chooses to treat the atmosphere we live in as critical infrastructure.