OPINION: NCAR is a critical national resource. Don't wreck it

The Trump administration has announced that it plans to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a world-famous research facility in Boulder, Colorado. Wrecking NCAR would be an enormous mistake — not at all in the national interest.

NCAR is primarily funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Part of its mission is to carry out independent research on weather and climate, emphasizing large-scale projects that are difficult for individual scientists working independently at universities or smaller labs. A complementary part of its mission is to provide collaboration and infrastructure to support researchers elsewhere, things like radars, research aircraft and supercomputing resources.

I've never been employed by NCAR, but in many ways NCAR staff worked for me throughout my career in the atmospheric sciences. I carried out my master's thesis research at the University of Washington using NCAR's computers, and my first co-authored publication had an NCAR scientist as the first author. I was supported to spend a summer at NCAR, sharing ideas and learning to be a scientist.

When I was a Ph.D student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NCAR staff helped me collect and archive the data from tropical Pacific islands that I needed for my dissertation research on the origins of El Niño. As a post-doc I struck up a collaboration with a very famous NCAR scientist — my first funded research grant. When I ultimately moved to a faculty position at the University of New Mexico, one of the first pieces of correspondence I received upon my arrival was an unsolicited letter from one of NCAR's group directors, wishing me well in my new job and offering to help with computing and other research infrastructure needs.

So hearing that NCAR might be gutted hits me personally. And my story is hardly unique. NCAR supports atmospheric research across the board. NCAR support is especially important for researchers (like me) at universities in states such as New Mexico that don't have full-blown meteorology departments.

By the way, none of the research I've referred to above had anything to do with human-caused climate change, although NCAR certainly supports that research too. My own research pre-UNM was all about understanding natural climate variability and improving forecasts on weekly and seasonal time scales, resulting in scientific papers that have been cited by other researchers worldwide more than 10,000 times. That work is not in the national interest?

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, explains that NCAR is "one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country." What a load of crap. NCAR supports science and scientists to study the atmosphere. Dismantling NCAR amounts to nothing more than choosing stupidity by crippling the atmospheric research enterprise for the entire nation. This should not happen.

David Gutzler is professor emeritus in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of New Mexico. His research at UNM focused on climate variability and change across southwestern North America.