This week’s mammoth U.S. winter blast wasn’t the only storm affecting the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society occurring in Houston, Texas. Looming in the background of the meeting – and jumping into the foreground during an evening town hall on Wednesday, January 28 – was the fate of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, which the Trump administration is moving to dismantle.
Based in Boulder, Colorado, and sponsored by the National Science Foundation since its founding in 1960, NCAR (or NSF NCAR, as the center brands itself) is a premier national and global hub for weather, water, and climate-related research. Beyond carrying out its own work, NCAR manages aircraft and supercomputing resources used by many hundreds of scientists, and it collaborates with many public and private stakeholders.
“NCAR is great at engaging our communities with a focus on the next generation of scientists. I think losing that would be a tremendous loss,” outgoing American Meteorological Society President David Stensrud said at the town hall. Stensrud first worked with NCAR in 1989 as a Ph.D. student.
NCAR is managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR, a not-for-profit entity that also manages other programs serving the broad community of weather, water, and climate science. Between NCAR and its other activities, UCAR employs close to 1,400 scientists, software engineers, technicians, and other professionals. Hundreds of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers take part each year in conferences, fellowships, and other opportunities provided by NCAR and UCAR.
When UCAR President Antonio Busalacchi asked everyone at the town hall to stand if they had worked at NCAR, visited its labs, used its models or other resources, or collaborated with its scientists, nearly everyone in the crowd of a few hundred was on their feet.
“A disbanded, fragmented NCAR would be the worst-case scenario,” Busalacchi said. The best-case scenario, in his eyes: “a building-back better and an improved NCAR … It’s always good to have an open, transparent, objective analysis of alternatives.”
In the Q&A section of the meeting, one postdoctoral scientist crystallized what feels like unending uncertainty: “As a research postdoc, I don’t know what it means for things to look good. What does it look like for things to be good, and how do I navigate when things are this bad?”
Attacked over climate change research
The Trump administration has said it wants to dismantle NCAR because of its role in researching climate change.
“The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado,” Russ Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement first reported by USA TODAY on December 16. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway and any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
Scientists from across the nation and abroad have stressed that NCAR is far more than the sum of its parts, a theme that was reinforced at the American Meteorological Society meeting in Houston.
Read: Trump administration announces plans to ‘break up’ the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Thus far, the National Science Foundation has shown every intention of carrying out the White House mandate. The foundation released a statement on December 17 that included the following: “NSF remains committed to providing world-class infrastructure for weather modeling, space weather research and forecasting, and other critical functions. To do so, NSF will be engaging with partner agencies, the research community, and other interested parties to solicit feedback for rescoping the functions of the work currently performed by NCAR.”
On January 23, just ahead of the American Meteorological Society meeting, the National Science Foundation released a “Dear Colleague Letter,” a document typically used by the foundation to invite scientists to participate in grant opportunities or to provide input on research directions.
This was no ordinary Dear Colleague Letter. Its title – “NSF Intent to Restructure Critical Weather Infrastructure” – does not even mention NCAR. And omitted from the document is any mention of research in several areas that have been integral parts of the center’s work for virtually all of its 66-year history, including atmospheric chemistry and climate. The document requests “expressions of interest in and/or concepts of operation” for “NCAR space weather activities” and “NCAR weather modeling and atmospheric observing activities,” as well as the world-renowned NCAR Mesa Laboratory itself. The deadline for input is March 13.
Congress shores up science funding, declines to protect NCAR
The NCAR bombshell arrived just as the picture was looking modestly brighter for U.S. science support overall. After rapid, high-impact cuts to U.S. science funding and staffing implemented by the White House in the first half of 2025, and massive cuts on the order of 25-50% proposed for this year, the fiscal-year 2026 appropriations approved this month by Congress for science agencies such as NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation ended up largely similar to those from the prior year, with much more modest cuts.
However, NCAR base support is not allocated directly by Congress, but rather indirectly, through funding that goes to the National Science Foundation. Colorado’s two senators, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, made attempts to insert language protecting NCAR in the FY26 appropriations bill, but their amendments were voted down.
“NCAR is a vital, cutting-edge research institution, and dismantling it would be reckless, dangerous, and place the United States at a serious competitive disadvantage,” said Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Colorado, in a statement released on January 27.
Despite the brighter appropriations picture for science overall, federal staffing at science agencies is down 10-25% over the past year, Stensrud said at the town hall.
“I think there will be a repercussion that’s going to reverberate for years to come,” said Stensrud, referring to the staff cuts in science agencies and the many early retirements that were heavily incentivized: “It’s really hard to predict how this is going to play out, but it certainly has me concerned.”
The Mesa Lab question
One revealing aspect of the Dear Colleague Letter is its reference to NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory. The first project of famed architect I.M. Pei to be built outside an urban setting, the modernist building opened in 1967 and was featured in Woody Allen’s 1973 film “Sleeper.” The Mesa Lab welcomes thousands of visitors year-round to its free indoor and outdoor exhibits, including North America’s first weather-oriented interpretive hiking trail, the Walter Orr Roberts Weather Trail.
The letter seeks input on ownership for public or private use.
The site on Table Mesa overlooking Boulder was chosen in 1960 from among four finalist locations. Although the site lay above the “blue line” that had been recently adopted by Boulder as a boundary for development, city voters voted on a ballot measure on January 31, 1961, that would grant an exception to the Table Mesa site (at the time a set of parcels owned by several private parties) for construction of NCAR, with most of the land preserved as open space.
The ballot measure was overwhelmingly approved, and later in 1961, the state of Colorado purchased the site and donated it to the National Science Foundation for the purpose of building and hosting NCAR. How this arrangement might get interpreted, or reinterpreted, 65 years later is just one of many questions hanging over this unprecedented moment in postwar atmospheric science.
A model collaboration across ice, ocean, and atmosphere
Ironically, the threat to NCAR has arrived just as one of NCAR’s most noteworthy modeling projects has gotten the nod to become the core of NOAA’s next-generation unified model, a framework used for day-to-day weather forecasting as well as other applications in both operations and research.
Ken Graham, director of NOAA’s National Weather Service, announced at the American Meteorological Society meeting this week that the service is moving toward MPAS, the Model for Prediction Across Scales, as the dynamical core for its future modeling development. MPAS had been the first runner-up in the 2010s when NOAA developed its first Unified Forecast System, but the nod in 2016 went to the Finite-Volume on a Cubed-Sphere dynamical core, developed by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.
MPAS has been a team effort, with NCAR having the main responsibility for the atmospheric model, Los Alamos National Laboratory the ocean and ice models, and the two labs collaborating on overall MPAS development. Among the standout elements of MPAS is its variable-mesh grid: in contrast to the fixed 3D grids more common in weather and climate modeling, this grid can be tightened regionally in response to weather events of interest or other user needs. MPAS has been used widely in academia as well as in collaboration with The Weather Company.
Last spring, NCAR used MPAS to produce weather forecasts going out 60 hours that spanned the entire planet’s surface at points separated by just three kilometers (1.9 miles) – a total of over 65 million horizontal cells, plus 11 vertical layers.
Helping young scientists cultivate new research
Carlos Martinez, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is among the many graduate and postgraduate students who have spent one to two years at NCAR as part of the center’s Advanced Study Program. Dating back to the 1960s, the program encourages participants to cast their nets widely, drawing on the many areas of expertise present at NCAR to craft research that best reflects their interests and skills while furthering their eventual careers.
In an op-ed published January 27 in the journal Eos, “What Americans Lose If Their National Center for Atmospheric Research Is Dismantled,” Martinez wrote:
Administration officials have argued that NCAR’s work can simply be redistributed to other institutions without loss. But NCAR is not just another research center. It is purpose-built critical infrastructure designed to integrate observations, modeling, supercomputing, and applied research in ways that no single university, agency, or contractor can replicate on its own …
NSF has already outlined plans to restructure NCAR, including moving its supercomputer to another site and transferring or divesting research aircraft it operates. These risks would hollow out the institution itself, breaking apart integrated teams, disrupting continuity in projects, and weakening the unique collaborative model at NCAR that accelerates scientific progress in weather, water, climate, and space weather. This distinction matters. NCAR’s value does not lie solely in the science it produces, but in how that science is organized, sustained, and shared across the nation.
In these and other ways over the past few weeks, the importance of NCAR as a unique nexus for atmospheric and related science has come through time and again.
Busalacchi cited a letter sent by UCAR’s board of trustees to the National Science Foundation in advance of last week’s Dear Colleague Letter: “Without a central hub for advanced Earth system capabilities, our nation’s scientific leadership would be set back decades to a time when the siloed nature of research created infrastructure barriers to coordinated progress and limited our ability to provide information to safeguard communities and the economy. Splitting up NSF NCAR will reverse decades of progress with dire consequences for the safety and prosperity of all Americans.”
Jeff Masters contributed to this post.
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