Dismantling NCAR Would Weaken U.S. Weather, Safety and Food Systems

A proposed restructuring that separates key pieces of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) risks unraveling an integrated system that delivers operational weather and climate intelligence across multiple sectors. NCAR's strength lies in tightly coupled long-term observations, high-performance computing, model development, field assets and institutional partnerships; short-term contract reallocations and asset relocations would fracture those links and interrupt the iterative model improvements that steadily strengthen forecasts. The immediate technical consequence would be disrupted continuity in model development, data stewardship, and operational handoffs, slowing updates that emergency managers and utilities rely on. Aviation safety is particularly exposed: decades of targeted research—on turbulence, icing, microbursts and volcanic ash—feed tools used by crews and regulators, and dispersing those capabilities would raise exposure to flight hazards and increase operating costs. Agriculture would lose coordinated forecasting tools and decision-support systems; pilot studies suggest broad adoption of advanced farm-focused services could yield very large water and energy savings and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Defense and national security operators, who require dependable, mission-specific environmental intelligence, would face higher operational risks and procurement costs if trusted products are dispersed across institutions. Public-safety gains from forecast improvements—economically valued in the tens of billions annually—would be harder to sustain without a central program to coordinate research, testing and operational handoff. These threats are compounded by recent moves at other agencies that have eroded observing capacity and institutional knowledge: workforce attrition, curtailed public data access and reviewed missions at NASA create gaps in satellite records and expertise that NCAR-dependent models ingest. Ad hoc partnerships or temporary contracts are a weaker substitute for sustained federal stewardship; losing both institutional modeling capability and long-running observational time series would produce effects larger than either loss alone. Near-term policy choices about contracts, supercomputing location, aircraft ownership and cross-agency workforce management will determine whether these complementary capabilities are preserved or dispersed. The most effective prevention calls for coordinated stakeholder feedback to the National Science Foundation, congressional measures to protect institutional cohesion, and targeted rehiring and knowledge-transfer programs to rebuild and retain critical expertise. Without those steps, the United States risks a prolonged decline in authoritative environmental intelligence that underpins disaster readiness and climate-sensitive industries.