A NOAA Climate Agency in Asheville Was Knocked Out by Helene

A NOAA Climate Agency in Asheville Was Knocked Out by Helene - The New York Times

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Helene Knocked Out a Key Facility for Monitoring the Global Climate

The National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, N.C., sweep together data from around the world to help track Earth’s warming.

Among the many pieces of critical infrastructure that Hurricane Helene knocked offline in Asheville, N.C., was a key federal office for monitoring the global climate. Work is underway to get the facility running again, but the outage is likely to delay some agencies’ monthly updates on global warming and other climate indicators.

The data center at the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, remained shut down, according to John Bateman, a NOAA spokesman. The building that houses the facility had power but not water, and its network service provider still was not operational.

All of the center’s employees have been accounted for, although many were still without electricity and water at their homes, Mr. Bateman said. The center’s data archive, including its paper and film records, was safe. But a number of its websites and systems remain offline, and NOAA officials were not sure when services might be restored.

NOAA’s weather forecasts and national weather portal were not affected.

The National Centers for Environmental Information have headquarters in Asheville and three other main offices around the country. The tools and data they provide are used by farmers, fishermen, businesses, insurers, investors and other organizations. The centers also play a critical role in tracking the global climate: They sweep together information from weather agencies worldwide and make the data easily accessible to researchers.

“They’re not the only source of this data,” said Robert Rohde, the chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit climate data group. “But they are by far the most convenient, in that they remove the difficulty of needing to talk to lots of different weather agencies around the world.”

Crucially, organizations including NASA and Berkeley Earth use data compiled by NOAA to estimate the globe’s average temperature each month. These updates have shown that, over the past year, nearly every month has been Earth’s warmest for that time of year in recorded history.

NOAA officials were still trying to determine how the Asheville outage might affect its regular climate reports, said Mr. Bateman, the agency spokesman. NASA said its next global temperature update would “probably” be delayed. Berkeley Earth’s was likely to be delayed as well, Dr. Rohde said.

If the outage continues for many more weeks, Berkeley Earth might start looking at other options for compiling the data it needs, Dr. Rohde said, although that would be “time and labor intensive.”

NASA recently examined ways to make its facilities more resilient to climate change, said Gavin Schmidt, director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. “But what happened in Asheville underlines just how difficult that might be when something like Helene happens,” he said.

The Asheville facility dates back to the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. government gathered many millions of pages of nationwide weather records there for safekeeping. It was originally called the National Weather Records Center and was renamed the National Centers for Environmental Information after combining with two other NOAA data centers in 2015.