As NOAA Cuts Continue, Ocean Researchers Worry About Monitoring Programs

A global network of buoys that measure sea surface temperatures could be vulnerable because the U.S. funds about half the program.

Political storm clouds darkened the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration again this week as the weather and climate agency fired more than 1,000 workers for the second time within five weeks.The first mass firings started in mid-February and were deemed illegal by a federal court in California on March 13. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision this week, leading to the renewed terminations. 

At the same time, several news organizations reported Friday that the White House will soon ask Congress to make big cuts to NOAA and NASA’s climate research programs. The suggested cuts were outlined in communications between NOAA and the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

Rachel Cauley, OMB communications director, said, “No final funding decisions have been made,” in response to questions about NOAA’s funding from Inside Climate News.

The personnel and program cuts are part of President Donald Trump’s overall efforts to slash the size of the federal government and its budget. But NOAA’s climate research has also been singled out as a target for cuts by Project 2025, a conservative policy agenda developed by the Heritage Foundation for the second Trump administration. The document labels NOAA as a hotbed of climate alarmism and suggests breaking it up by putting its functions under other federal agencies, state control or by privatizing them.

The administration this week also moved to cut congressionally approved funding for the Global Change Research Program, which includes most major federal agencies and produces the National Climate Assessment, a comprehensive report mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 that requires its release every four years.

On Friday, Science reported that the White House is looking for even bigger cuts to both NOAA and NASA’s climate research programs in 2026, based on budget communications between the Office of Management and Budget and NOAA. The story says the White House seeks to close all or some of NOAA’s regional science centers, and nearly eliminate funding for NOAA’s research branch, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research.

NOAA’s 2024 budget was $6.72 billion. By comparison, the 2024 Department of Energy budget was about $50 billion, and the federal government spends about $15 billion annually on subsidies for fossil fuel development, according to the Environmental and Energy Institute.

The unrest and uncertainty at the federal weather and climate agency is rippling around the world, as researchers in other countries worry about interruptions to the flow of critical climate data from NOAA’s many Earth-observing missions.

A critical international ocean monitoring program called Argo could be especially vulnerable because of the large U.S. role in the operation, said Jochem Marotzke, director of the department of climate variability at the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.

“The U.S. is funding a bit more than half of Argo,” he said. “You could say the U.S. is carrying more than its fair share, which means that if the U.S. pulls out, it will leave an inordinately large gap.”

The Argo program is an example of “how resolutely the U.S. has long assumed the leading role in climate research and how admirably much has been invested in it,” he said. “That’s why so many of us in climate science have gone to the U.S. to conduct research. if the United States decides no longer to invest in climate research, it will be a disaster.”

The Argo network consists of about 4,000 widely distributed ocean floats that monitor water temperature and salinity in the top layers of the ocean, up to about 1 mile deep, where more than 90 percent of all the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored. 

The network was started in 1999 and expanded to a peak of 4,000 floats in 2020. Since then, the number has dropped to 3,600 floats, due to budget constraints and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on ship operations. Argo’s annual budget is about $40 million. About 800 of the floats are replaced each year, and the U.S. currently deploys about half of those,

“If we don’t replace them at the same rate, slowly the system will degrade,” he said. 

Losing ocean data means less information about high-stakes impacts like ocean heatwaves that can wipe out fish populations, kill coral reefs and cause toxic algal blooms that threaten fisheries and other marine life. 

Marotzke said his concerns extend to climate data delivered by NASA satellites and other NOAA and NASA climate missions. 

“NASA is still the most important agency for Earth observation,” he said. “I think many of us in the science community often don’t even think about who launched that satellite and where it comes from.”

He said measurement of rising sea levels is one of the most important tasks in his field, and U.S. satellites that can measure height of the water accurately are key parts of the global observing system. The curtailing of those measurements would be disastrous, he said. 

Even with the current chaos in government agencies, he said he doesn’t expect a complete loss of climate data from the U.S.

“That would essentially mean that NASA would be ordered to cut certain data streams and not to make them available,” he said. “Even in the current madness, I find that unlikely to happen. I don’t expect that the data streams of a functioning satellite will be forcibly cut off. That would be almost like sabotage.

“Firing people wantonly is sabotage, but it’s a different type of sabotage,” he added.

Cover photo:  An Argo network float packaged in a deployment box is lowered from the MV Explorer while it is moving through the ocean. Boxes are used to protect floats from water impact when deployed from a moving ship. Credit: Argo Program