Why Climate and Weather Services Can’t Be National Silos
The Earth Science pilgrimage to the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in the US attracted about 25,000 participants from across the world in December 2025. Usually, the numbers tend to exceed 30,000, but uncertainties about entry visas appear to have scared away a significant number of foreign attendees. The slashing of research funds in the US also seems to have played a role.
When the meeting was under way, the US government announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), located in Boulder, Colorado, would be broken up, with the weather and climate modelling and supercomputing facilities transferred to other entities. The details remain unclear, as do the timelines. The shock left the attendees reeling.
The reactions from the climate community have been predictable: protests, letters to elected officials, social media outrage, and interviews on the value of NCAR to the US and beyond. What will come after these initial reactions remains unclear. What is clear is that bold leadership and fresh thinking will be needed to face this new adversity and other such potential future disruptions to weather and climate enterprises.
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NCAR was established in 1960 to meet the needs of fundamental atmospheric research since post-war efforts were heavily geared towards weather forecasting. It is hardly possible to overstate the significance and value of the community model that emerged from NCAR over the decades. But it is clear that relying on past accomplishments may not be enough to save NCAR if the Trump administration believes NCAR represents climate alarmism—the stated reason for dismantling it.
Brave leadership
The current US administration’s hostility towards accepting climate change as a serious risk is well established. The climate community has long advised humanity that responses to global warming need to be transformational. Now, the time has come for transformational adaptations in the way we respond to such threats to the weather and climate prediction infrastructure. We need future scenarios for our own survival as a scientific community serving global communities.
Climate scientists have been developing increasingly complicated future scenarios to map the evolution of greenhouse gas emissions and societal responses in terms of technologies, policies, and collective actions. These scenarios are meant to offer pathways to keeping the world on track to meeting the global warming targets under the Paris Agreement—1.5°C and well below 2°C above the preindustrial climate.
These socioeconomic scenarios are fed to earth system models to produce a range of future climate evolutions and warming levels with their global and regional impacts on all sectors, from energy to food, water, fisheries, forests, and health. The uncertainties in these future climate evolutions are mostly determined by natural or internal variabilities and model biases for the immediate decade or two. For the decades beyond, the climate evolution and warming uncertainties are dominated by uncertainties in the socioeconomic drivers themselves. As geopolitical conflicts continue, it is clear that the business of imagining societal evolutions is anything but straightforward.
Dark clouds hang over Thiruvananthapuram’s Meteorological Observatory, in the heart of the city on January 2, 2025. National services are clearly needed to meet each nation’s needs to manage their weather and climate risks. | Photo Credit: S. Mahinsha
The hapless and predictable responses evoked by the NCAR’s breakup plan also underscore that the climate community itself is hardly future-ready. Its focus has been on simply arguing that NCAR is indispensable and its dismantling will do irreparable harm to the country’s weather and climate prediction enterprises, which are needed desperately at this time when climate change impacts rage across the world. Will this argument suffice to dodge the sledgehammer this administration is swinging at all climate actions, renewable energy, climate predictions, and disaster management?
Highly unlikely
The news of the NCAR breakup should serve as a tipping point to shake the climate community into action. Recasting the weather and climate enterprise as global commons that need global coordination and funding would be a good start. The enterprise needs to become resilient against such shocks in the future at local or global scales. How would such a framework evolve rapidly? Here is one possible way forward.
The number of weather and climate models participating in the Climate Assessment Reports (ARs) under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is growing rapidly and needs a review, and a cost-benefit analysis of the efforts and their utility in real decisions.
National services are clearly needed to meet each nation’s needs to manage their weather and climate risks. Global actions needed under the Paris Agreement are being addressed by global mitigation efforts and local adaptation plans. But the constant reminders of how far behind we are indicate that the commendable global efforts remain mostly inadequate for staying on track to meet the Paris Agreement goals.
The underlying scientific guidance for global actions is derived from a multitude of national models, with no cost-benefit analysis of developing so many models independently and carrying out massive simulations consuming substantial energy and human hours. Many countries have multiple publicly funded modelling centres with no clear distinctions.
Why not make modelling also a coordinated, unified, and optimised global activity—from model development, improvements, and simulations to delivering the services to safely navigate climate evolution to meet the Paris Agreement goals?
The current class of IPCC models does not offer climate information at the scales required for adaptation decisions or climate risk management. A global centre for developing a unified 1 km scale model has been proposed. Such high-resolution modelling cannot happen without global coordination and global funding. With the advent of AI, it is now clear that optimising observational and monitoring networks and improving dynamic models is the future. Making weather and climate predictions and projections with hybrid dynamic-AI models is also attracting private players such as Google and Microsoft.
Numerous small and medium enterprises across the planet use global predictions to deliver weather and climate products for agriculture, water, health, etc. The ecosystem for unifying observational and modelling efforts is evolving haphazardly, but fresh thinking can make this a systematic, cost-effective, efficient, and unified global effort.
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Instead of simply defending any one centre such as NCAR as indispensable, the global climate community can show bold leadership by building resilient weather and climate enterprises that are globally synergistic for both national and global needs and are protected by a global funding mechanism. Any shocks or disruptions from national political vagaries or other geopolitical perturbations can be absorbed by designing the global system with a hub-and-spoke model that protects both national and global services.
As unexpected as the news of the NCAR breakup is, it should not surprise the climate community that it needs to be ready to adapt to such surprises. Our credibility is at stake if we cannot show fresh thinking in the face of such adversity. Communities and businesses are surprised at the ease with which they are advised to pick up and move in response to projected uncertain risks. We need to show now that we practise what we preach.
Raghu Murtugudde is Emeritus Professor, University of Maryland; Visiting Professor, Kotak