New Orleans, Louisiana
The administration of US President Donald Trump intends to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a world-leading Earth-science centre in Boulder, Colorado. The centre’s modelling and Earth observations underpin a wide range of US and global research, especially on climate.
“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” wrote Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, announcing the planned closure in a post yesterday on the social-media platform X. In a statement, the White House called NCAR “the premier research stronghold for left-wing climate lunacy”. The plan was first reported by USA Today.
The White House said that the National Science Foundation (NSF), which provides funding for the centre, “will be breaking up NCAR to eliminate Green New Scam research activities. Any vital functions, such as weather modeling and supercomputing, will be moved under the purview of another entity or location.”
On Wednesday, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) — the non-profit consortium of more than 130 colleges and universities that runs NCAR — received a letter of intent from the NSF regarding the planned break-up of NCAR, consortium president Antonio Busalacchi told Nature. The letter requested information regarding divesting, transferring or restructuring the various components of NCAR. It mentioned NCAR’s research aircraft fleet and its supercomputing center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, as components that might be relocated. “Morale is terrible,” Busalacchi says.
Any such action will be challenged by members of Congress. “I for one am not going to let this take place on my watch,” Joe Neguse, a Democrat who represents Boulder in the US House of Representatives, said Wednesday in a virtual address to the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Congress sets the federal budget and can direct the US government to fund NCAR.
The most recent agreement between the NSF and UCAR, which was signed in 2023, provides US$938 million to run NCAR for five years. Cancelling that award would eliminate the majority of NCAR’s annual budget. The rest of the budget comes from an array of federal and non-federal sources.
Central resource
News of the intended closure rippled quickly through the Earth-science community, with many starting a #SaveNCAR discussion across social-media platforms. “Dismantling NCAR is like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet,” wrote Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, on social media, adding that the laboratory is the “global mothership” of atmospheric science.
“To me personally, it’s just another unbelievably reckless blow to American science”, says Dawn Wright, an oceanographer and geographer at Esri, a geographic-information-system company in Redlands, California. “If the NSF does follow through with these plans to break up NCAR, that’s just going to decimate a huge chunk of the US climate research that we all depend on.”
The NSF established NCAR in 1960 to support US atmospheric-science research that requires computing or other resources beyond the means of any single institution. “If you cancel this, you will devastate atmospheric science,” says a researcher who formerly worked at the NSF and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “That’s different from other sciences that are more distributed.”
Work at NCAR played a key part in the rise of modern weather and climate forecasting. For instance, the lab pioneered the modern dropwindsonde, a weather instrument that can be released from an aircraft to measure conditions as it plummets through a storm. The technology reshaped the scientific understanding of hurricanes, says James Franklin, an atmospheric scientist and former branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit at the US National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.
NCAR scientists “collaborate with outside researchers and forecasters, develop and share models and other tools with the science community, and serve as custodians of important data sets used for research”, Franklin says.
NCAR also flies aircraft to gather data for research such as studies of the chemistry of wildfire smoke. It has led research into atmospheric rivers, the bands of water vapour that can drench coastal communities and lead to flooding, such as that currently affecting Washington.
Research powerhouse
On the global scale, NCAR is known for its climate-modelling work, including the world-leading models that underpin international assessments such as those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is unclear how efforts to close NCAR might affect the upcoming IPCC assessment, which is due to be completed in 2029 and is based on the outputs of dozens of climate models run around the globe, including at NCAR.
Hundreds of scientists pass through NCAR’s doors each year to collaborate with its researchers. More than 800 people are employed at NCAR, most of whom work at the centre’s three campuses in Boulder, including the iconic Mesa Lab that sits at the base of jagged mountain peaks and was designed by architect I. M. Pei.
That campus was closed on Wednesday, not because of Vought’s announcement but because the local electrical company planned to cut electricity preemptively to reduce wildfire risk as fierce winds were forecast around Boulder. In 2021, a wildfire ignited just kilometres from NCAR; fuelled by powerful winds, it ripped through suburban homes, killing two people. Many researchers say this is a new normal of increased fire risk in an era of climate change — a topic of study at NCAR.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-04134-w
Alexandra Witze is an award-winning science journalist and correspondent for the journal Nature. Her reporting has taken her from the North Pole (to report on climate change) to the jungles of Guatemala (to cover Maya archaeology) to China's quake-ravaged Sichuan province. Island on Fire is her first book and she lives in Boulder, CO.
Nature is a weekly international journal publishing the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature also provides rapid, authoritative, insightful and arresting news and interpretation of topical and coming trends affecting science, scientists and the wider public.
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