U.S. climate data websites go dark

U.S. scientists, state policymakers, farmers, and others who depend on up-to-date climate data on Thursday confronted an information blackout from federal regional climate centers across much of the country. “Unfortunately, all data and services offered under the base contract, including this website, will be unavailable unless and until funding is resumed,” a statement on the Southern Regional Climate Center’s website read.

“It’s a big deal,” says Jeff Andresen, a Michigan State University climatologist and president of the American Association of State Climatologists, about closures of the centers and their websites. “In terms of getting climate information to the real world, to the general public, they play a very, very key role.”

The disruption appears to be a temporary paperwork bottleneck within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), rather than a policy decision by agency leadership, officials at several of the centers say. The centers are managed by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. But they are housed chiefly at universities operating under 5-year agreements. The contracts for payment are approved each year. The last annual cycle ended on 16 April.
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A decision about funding for the current year, which is the final year in the 5-year agreements, is currently “somewhere in NOAA,” says John Nielsen-Gammon, a climatologist at Texas A&M University and director of the Southern Regional Climate Center. If approved, “then we can spin back up relatively quickly. Of course, there’s no guarantee they will approve things.”

The nation’s six regional climate centers, created in 1983, serve chiefly as data translators. They take oceans of climate-related measurements gathered from other sources, including NOAA, and turn them into user-friendly online applications.

Among other things, these applications can give state and local officials a view of drought conditions, help farmers decide when to plant a crop based on soil temperatures and historic patterns, and enable emergency responders to better assess the risk of storms turning into devastating floods, says Beth Hall, director of the Midwest Regional Climate Center at Purdue University. Most of her center’s website also vanished.

“[Emergency responders] are needing to make critical decisions for the safety of their constituents, their communities, and they no longer have access to those data,” says Hall, who is also the state climatologist for Indiana.

A spokesperson for NOAA, Jasmine Blackwell, did not provide details about why the contracts had not yet been approved. “We are not discussing internal personnel and management matters,” Blackwell wrote in an email to Science. “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”

It's not clear whether the hold-up is tied to a contract-by-contract review that President Donald Trump’s secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick, is conducting for new NOAA contracts or extensions to existing contracts above $100,000. The main contracts for all six regional climate centers total about $4 million per year.

Two of the regions—in the West and Northeast—got at least a temporary reprieve. Thanks to what appears to be a timing fluke, those centers received a 2-month funding extension, so their websites remain up. “I guess ours went in first and got in under the wire of executive orders that required more scrutiny of contract renewals,” says Art DeGaetano, director of the Northeast Regional Climate Center, based at Cornell University.

The current closures offer a taste of what might be to come. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has recommended ending funding for the regional climate centers in the budget request for the 2026 fiscal year that the administration is expected to send to Congress in coming weeks. Lawmakers would have to approve that request.

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