In January, the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) made a surprising announcement: It would change the computational heart of its premier forecast model, which divides the atmosphere into virtual parcels and solves the physical equations that describe how heat and moisture move around the globe. NWS had always relied on “dynamical cores” developed at its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But now, it would turn to a core developed at its longtime peer—and sometimes rival—the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the famed weather and climate research lab in Boulder, Colorado.
The news came with no small amount of irony. Just when NCAR was gaining validation and support from one part of the government, another was taking steps to dismantle it. A month earlier, Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), had said the White House would “break up” NCAR, citing its role in “climate alarmism.”