Global coordination can trump efforts to undercut climate predictions

Trump's firing of NOAA employees sparks discussion on climate predictions, highlighting the need for global, high-resolution models for resilience.

In one of his first acts in his second term as president of the United States, Donald Trump fired several hundred employees of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The move triggered a lot of discussion in the climate community and beyond about how it will hurt critical weather and climate services.

The climate community has been working hard to help people adapt to the effects of climate change and build resilience against consequences in the future, so it doesn’t help that the NOAA has now been downsized. While this is unfortunate, this isn’t entirely surprising considering the NOAA was also under considerable pressure during Trump’s first term as US president.

The weather is local while climate is global, but a good weather forecast still requires global patterns to be captured and accounted for. Climate predictions on the other hand focus on meteorological changes that occur more slowly across multiple seasons. Climate projections, on the other hand, offer various possible scenarios for multiple decades to come.

These projection efforts are coordinated closely by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). All the research centres involved in preparing these projections need to follow particular protocols as well as focus on certain previously agreed upon future scenarios. Once every few years, the IPCC prepares a grand synthesis of all simulations from tens of models to produce an assessment report. The latest such report was issued in 2021-2022.

Climate predictions on the other hand are national efforts with some coordination under the UN World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), especially for global observational systems. Climate predictions need the models to be prepared by  ‘initialising’ them before each forecast begins. Data from all the relevant sources — including weather-monitoring stations and satellites — are fed into the models responsible for simulating ocean, atmosphere, and land systems. Different prediction centers follow different methodologies during this data assimilation step. Since no single country can cover the globe with its observation systems, global coordination in this enterprise is inevitable.

Climate predictions also tend to be internal efforts. The participating countries under the WMO also merge multiple such predictions to produce a so-called multi-model ensemble.

But as Trump’s decision to take a sledgehammer to the NOAA indicates, we may need to make climate predictions the same way we prepare the well-coordinated climate projections, with redundancies in the global to regional predictions, in order to protect the overall prediction enterprise from political vagaries and other debilitating perturbations.