NOAA FY26 budget proposal slashes climate and weather research, shutters key labs

By Mia MacGregor

July 3 - (The Insurer) - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s proposed budget for the 2026 fiscal year would eliminate its Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) and terminate or transfer dozens of science programs and laboratories.

Under the proposal, OAR would receive no funding or personnel in 2026, ending direct federal support for a host of climate, weather and ocean research activities.

MAJOR LABORATORY CLOSURES

Several of the nation’s premier government science laboratories would be shuttered, including the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory in Miami, Florida; the Air Resources Laboratory in Maryland, Idaho and Tennessee; the Chemical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey; the Global Monitoring Laboratory in Colorado, Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa and Antarctica; the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington; and the Physical Sciences Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.

These closures would end long-running federal research on hurricanes, severe storms, air chemistry, ocean monitoring and climate modeling. NOAA said it would continue to support “high priority” research through other offices.

TERMINATIONS OF CLIMATE AND WEATHER PROGRAMS

The proposed budget eliminates all funding for OAR’s Climate Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, Regional Climate Data and Information, and Climate Competitive Research. This would halt federal support for regional climate data services and competitive climate research grants.

Weather research faces similar cuts. The Weather Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes program would be terminated, ending federal funding for research on weather prediction, atmospheric chemistry and severe weather events.

Notably, the budget discontinues support for the Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment and the Warn on Forecast system.

Several programs, including the U.S. Weather Research Program, Tornado Severe Storm Research and Phased Array Radar, and the Joint Technology Transfer Initiative, would be transferred to the National Weather Service, but with reduced funding.

REDUCTIONS IN OCEAN AND TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH

The budget provides no funding for Ocean Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, the National Sea Grant College Program, Sea Grant Aquaculture Research, or the National Oceanographic Partnership Program. Ocean Exploration and Research, Integrated Ocean Acidification and Sustained Ocean Observations and Monitoring would be transitioned to the National Ocean Service.

High Performance Computing Initiatives and Research Supercomputing, which provide advanced computing resources for weather modeling and forecasting, would be moved to the NWS with significant funding reductions.

NOAA said the restructuring is intended to “streamline program management and focus on NOAA’s weather mission”.

“These adjustments will allow these research programs to carry out research that is more directly related to the NOAA mission,” the budget proposal stated.

With the elimination of OAR, the federal government would lose a central hub for climate and atmospheric research used to monitor and forecast climate variability, extreme weather and ocean changes.

In June, NOAA announced that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, a key atmospheric data collection initiative run by the Department of Defense, will stop distributing data products to users on July 31.

This decision followed NOAA's recent discontinuation of Climate.gov, a platform dedicated to climate science data and insights.

It also coincides with NOAA's forecast of above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin for the 2025 season.