NCAR Closure Plan Sparks Climate Science Outcry

Researchers express concern that addressing the needs of the national climate change is vulnerable to the destruction of NCAR, which will cost the nation vital climate and weather research strength.

The Trump administration urges to abolish the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado, and the measure has elicited immediate criticism among the scientific community, which believes that doing so could have grave consequences on environmental sustainability initiatives across the country. NCAR was established in 1960; it is commonly considered the mainspring of U.S. climate and atmospheric studies.

Administration officials have been condemning the center as a generator of climatic fear-mongering, yet the climate scientists contend that work done by NCAR forms the basis of weather predictions, disaster preparedness and long-term climatic modeling needed by environmental sustainability. The center maintains state-of-the-art supercomputers, study planes and creates data utilized by researchers and forecasters all over the world.

In her view, Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Brown University, said that NCAR has a special niche that spans the entire gamut of the atmospheric science sphere, including a mixture of short-term weather prediction and long-range climate understanding. She cautioned that dissolving the institution would interfere with decades of investment that is important to the security of communities and infrastructure due to the increasing climate risk.

Meteorologist Matthew Cappucci of MyRadar reiterated those issues by pointing out that a great number of the underlying tools that handle modern forecasting were developed at NCAR. He cautioned that undermining such research capacity could have real-life impacts on population safety and environmental sustainability.

Scientists were also on the offensive against the accusations of politicization and pointed out that the data given in the atmosphere is scientific and unbiased. With increasing levels of extreme weather conditions, scholars believe that the only solution to national resilience, economic viability, and sustainable ecology over both short and long-term scales is permanent investment in climate studies.