{"id":460465,"date":"2025-12-20T17:39:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-20T17:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/460465\/"},"modified":"2025-12-20T17:39:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-20T17:39:11","slug":"trump-targets-atmospheric-research-center-key-to-fires-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/460465\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump targets atmospheric research center key to fires, California"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rachel Becker<\/a>, CalMatters<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\""A\"
\n\t\t\t\tA resident shovels mud deposited by flooding from his driveway in Cutler on March 12, 2023. Photo by Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters\/CatchLight Local<\/p>\n

This story was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n

California officials and researchers across the country are sounding the alarm about the Trump administration\u2019s plans to dismember a global hub for weather, wildfire and climate science: the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Russell Vought<\/a>, President<\/a> Donald<\/a> Trump<\/a>\u2019s director of the Office of Management and Budget, posted Tuesday<\/a> on the social media platform X that the National Science Foundation will be \u201cbreaking up\u201d the science institution, which he called \u201cone of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

The move comes as Trump clashes with Colorado Governor Jared Polis. But scientists warn that dismantling the federally-funded science center<\/a> will endanger Americans even beyond the hundreds whose jobs are now at risk in Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m alarmed. I’m worried. I’m upset. And I think we need to connect the dots between attacks on science and what it means to the safety of Americans,\u201d California’s Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot told CalMatters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Vought said in his social media post that \u201cany vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the research fields aren’t easily disentangled, and experts say weather science can\u2019t withstand the cuts to critical climate research. In California, weather extremes highlight the high stakes as an atmospheric river storm<\/a> looms and the one-year anniversary of Los Angeles\u2019 climate-fueled catastrophic wildfires<\/a> approaches.<\/p>\n

State climatologist Michael Anderson said that the National Center for Atmospheric Research has worked with California agencies in the past on projects to improve precipitation predictions and snowpack modeling<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Losing the science center, he said, \u201cwill set the nation back in being able to respond to extreme weather events.\u201d<\/p>\n

The research institution, often referred to as NCAR, is managed by a nonprofit consortium of 120 colleges and universities. It shares tools including aircraft<\/a> and supercomputers, as well as expertise and research vital to understanding and predicting wildfire behavior, smoke exposure<\/a>, storms<\/a>, floods and drought \u2014 with implications for public safety, agriculture and more.<\/p>\n

\u201cGutting NCAR is putting American lives and property at higher risk of fire, because we’re not going to have the information that we need in order to really understand it and address how fires are increasing in a warming world,\u201d said Jennifer Balch<\/a>, a preeminent fire scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose own work has investigated California and other Western states\u2019 increasingly devastating wildfires.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Balch spoke as high fire-risk weather in December<\/a> forced a power shutoff to her Colorado neighborhood, leaving her family to cook their breakfast on the grill.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUndercutting our science community like this is only going to hurt Americans,\u201d Balch said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Craig Clements<\/a>, chair of the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jos\u00e9 State University, said that the next generation of scientists would lose vital training opportunities if the research center were dismantled.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey get to have hands-on experience with state of the art research, aircraft, facilities and researchers,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Clements said he was in shock that this was even being proposed. \u201cHow are they going to do this? Is this really going to happen?\u201d he said. \u201cIt’s going to devastate atmospheric science research worldwide \u2014\u00a0not just California, not just the U.S. It is the leading atmospheric science institution in the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s office called this research \u201clife saving\u201d in a news release Friday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately for the American people, Trump\u2019s Budget Director, Russell Vought \u2014 also known as\u00a0 \u201ca right-wing absolute zealot\u201d<\/a>\u2014 is targeting the Center to line the pockets of Big Oil,\u201d the statement said. \u201cDespite what the Trump administration hopes, extreme weather does not take the day off.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Crowfoot told CalMatters that the move is just one more example of the Trump administration attacking the science that keeps Californians safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOne that had us scrambling this fall was cuts to the federal funding for the California Nevada River Forecast Center<\/a>,\u201d Crowfoot said. California\u2019s emergency storm and flood efforts<\/a> rely on the forecast center to guide decisions such as where to pre-position emergency rescue teams.<\/p>\n

Crowfoot said there were such large personnel cuts that the state has been racing to fill the gaps as the rainy season takes hold. Gutting the atmospheric research center, he said, will force a similar scramble as universities and others try to maintain data, tools and expertise in its absence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFederal data and science and information is critical. What we’re experiencing across the country is this alarming adjustment to the loss of this information \u2014 and it’s happening on a weekly basis,\u201d Crowfoot said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Rachel Becker, CalMatters A resident shovels mud deposited by flooding from his driveway in Cutler on March…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":460466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[69,51,50,52,5609],"class_list":{"0":"post-460465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-wildfires"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}