Tag Archives: data

Decommissioned, retired, paused: The weather, climate, and Earth science data the government doesn’t want you to see

In the early 1990s, a University of Michigan graduate student named Jeff Masters started working on an internet weather project to share real-time weather information and satellite imagery, something most people take for granted today but was at the time revolutionary. That project was Weather Underground, which claims the honorific of being the “Internet’s 1st weather service.” It had a mission to “make quality weather information available to every person on this planet,” and promised to “provide weather data for those that are underserved by other weather providers.” Although it started as a service for universities and K-12 educators, Weather Underground became a commercial product in 1995, and for a time had more daily page views than the Weather Channel, which acquired the site in 2012.

More than three decades have passed since Weather Underground’s humble beginnings, and Masters left the company in 2019, but he can still rattle off the tools and software that he used to build the site. These include WXP, McIDAS, and LDM, all of which were provided by Unidata, a program started in the 1980s to share meteorological and atmospheric data between universities and to improve access for researchers and educators. To a layperson, these acronyms likely mean very little, but their general purpose is neatly conveyed in the name “Unidata”: a one-stop shop of universal tools for the distribution and management of data, specifically Earth and atmospheric data.

“Our little weather project was completely impossible without Unidata,” Masters told the Bulletin.

On May 12, the Unidata program paused most of its operations due to a lapse in funding from the National Science Foundation. Although it has a five-year grant from the foundation, it receives that funding in one-year increments and was due up for a new infusion shortly after the National Science Foundation instituted a funding freeze at the end of April. Now, almost the entire staff is furloughed, and the program is in limbo. It is unclear how long the funding freeze will be in effect or when the program will be able to resume operations, although a blog post on the website states, “We hope to get back to normal operations and be working with you again soon.”

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Bulletin: ‘We’re losing our environmental history’: The future of government information under Trump

As the director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project, Rachel Santarsiero is in the business of monitoring and facilitating the flow of information from the government to the public. What she’s seeing now, in the first weeks of President Trump’s second administration, is throwing the continuity of that process into doubt.

“We’re really losing our history here; we’re losing our environmental history,” Santarsiero told the Bulletin last week.

To some extent, government watchdogs, scientists, and climate and environmental activists were expecting this. During the first Trump administration, the use of terms like “climate change,” “clean energy,” and “adaptation” across federal environmental websites fell by 26 percent. In some cases, those terms were replaced by more ambiguous phrases like “energy independence” and “resilience”; other pages referencing climate change simply vanished.

But what Santarsiero and others are witnessing now goes far beyond that. Thousands of datasets have been removed from federal websites. Information on climate and the environment—from agencies like the EPA, the Council on Environmental Quality, NOAA, NASA, the State Department, and the Defense Department—has been deleted or become virtually impossible to find.

The administration’s wrecking-ball approach has raised profound questions about the integrity and future of vast amounts of information, public or not.

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Republished by Grist here.