In Texas, cattle ranchers depend on hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to handle drought disasters. Now some key government data — which is used to determine those payments — has disappeared from the internet.
So has the data that North Carolina schools use to forecast whether it will be too hot for high school football teams to safely practice. As well as the data tools farmers in Kansas and Nebraska use to plan for the growing season.
On Thursday, the Trump administration let contracts for four of the six federally-managed regional weather hubs expire. The Regional Climate Centers were forced to abruptly stop operating, with no information about whether the White House intends to keep them alive.
Leaders at two of the four closed centers told NOTUS they remain clueless about whether their parent organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is planning on renewing the contracts. The remaining two centers — in the Northeast and on the West Coast — still have funding through mid-June, but they don’t have contracts approved beyond that point.
“There’s such wide-ranging impacts here. Agriculture, commerce in general, relies very heavily on weather data, both current and forecasted,” said Charles Konrad, the head of the Southeast Regional Climate Center.
The Trump administration has no obligation to keep funding the centers because their existence is not explicitly mandated by Congress. The current funding extension, passed by Congress in March for the rest of the fiscal year, has no specific instructions for how NOAA must spend its money. While it’s not clear what the administration intends for the centers long term, leaked budget planning documents show that the White House is considering cutting about one-third of NOAA’S total budget.
NOAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Regional Climate Centers analyze and share information about temperatures, rainfall, snowmelt, air quality, and other weather information with states and forecasters. Farmers use this data to decide when to plant or to calculate when they might lose a crop, energy companies and utilities use it to understand electricity demand, and city water managers use it to manage the drought-plagued Southwest.
Other federal government efforts also depend on this data, such as the Department of Energy‘s work analyzing how power prices and temperature relate.
Only two of the eight widely-shared tools created by these centers are still available on the government’s webpage. Of the two that still worked as of Friday morning, one has a banner warning that funding will lapse in mid-June.
The Western Regional Climate Center, which is funded through June, also plays a role in managing radiological contamination data from the communities surrounding a Nevada nuclear test site. That monitoring program is still online, but the center’s website has a similar banner warning that support for the site may cease on June 17.
In Texas, state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, who also runs Southern Regional Climate Center, produces detailed daily maps of drought conditions that are fed into the U.S. Drought Monitor system. Those maps, which Nielsen-Gammon said are the most detailed ones available for Texas, inform weekly Drought Monitor reports, which then determine whether cattle ranchers will qualify for the drought relief program.
On April 9, just one week before the southern center had to stop operating, the Trump administration’s agriculture department designated 14 counties in Texas as natural disaster areas for drought.
“It’s not just a pretty picture. The trigger for that relief is a certain level of drought within their particular county, and so if it’s too low the ranchers won’t be getting it,” he said. “And if it’s erring on the dry side, then the federal government will be spending relief money that it isn’t supposed to be spending.”
If Nielsen-Gammon can’t produce these maps by Tuesday, the drought monitor likely won’t have that detailed data for next week’s report, he said. Representatives for the Drought Monitor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Southeast Regional Climate Center had, until Thursday, provided a popular tool showing when weather patterns skewed from the historical norms. It also published historical “wet bulb globe” temperatures, which are used to determine heat stress for people working and playing outside. North Carolina requires that public school athletics departments cancel games and practices when the “wet bulb” temperature is too high, and the tool provided by the regional center gives coaches and teams the ability to plan ahead for when it might be too hot, Konrad said.
Nearly every state has a climatologist — a scientist responsible for analyzing the state’s weather patterns and sharing it with policymakers and the public — and those climatologists heavily depend on the regional centers, said Baker Perry, Nevada’s climatologist.
Nevada local governments and agricultural communities depend on monthly drought assessments from Perry’s office — and his office depends on the Regional Climate Centers for the data underlying those reports.
“To be cutting funding to agencies that are tasked with helping us to make informed projections and better manage and prepare for water availability in the future, it’s a huge negative impact for sure,” he said.
“It will severely limit the amount of information that we’re able to communicate that any folks in agriculture, water resource management, and various sectors across the state depend on to make informed projections for water resource availability in the coming months.”
In Pennsylvania, state climatologist Kyle Imhoff frequently relies on maps from the High Plains center that show how temperature and precipitation are deviating from the norm, some of which is designed specifically for the farming community.
“These Regional Climate Centers, they are the backbone of what we develop at the state level,” he said. “It really spans all sectors, pretty much anything you can think of. They develop things for us that we couldn’t develop ourselves, that are crucial for our operations. It will be a major disruption if this continues for an extended period of time,” he said.
In Texas, Nielsen-Gammon has also been using regional data to assess whether the city of Austin is going to have an unexpected water supply problem — a project that will be much more difficult because the data is now offline.
“What we do is necessarily public service,” he said. “It’s the sort of thing that would be inordinately expensive to do individually, and something that’s extremely valuable to have as a service.”
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.