How Ex-NOAA Experts Are Rebuilding a Shuttered Climate Data Website

A user examines data from NOAA’s Phased Array Radar. NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory

For over a decade, Climate.gov was a reliable source of climate data for upwards of 1 million visitors every month, according to numbers published in 2021. The site, which was operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was a free, trusted resource where teachers, journalists, broadcast meteorologists, farmers, insurance companies, and anyone else with questions about climate could get information about anything from changing weather patterns to local drought conditions.

“Our data visualizations and graphics have been widely shared and republished online, in print, and by broadcast media. Professors assigned our ENSO blog as required reading for their courses,” Rebecca Lindsey, former program manager for Climate.gov, explained to Twin Cities Geek.

Effectively, Climate.gov was a major public investment in collectively improving climate literacy across the board—that is, until the Trump administration shuttered the site and laid off its staff. Now, when users navigate to Climate.gov, they’re redirected to noaa.gov/climate—which contains some of the information previously provided through Climate.gov but lacks a majority of the relevant links and organized data.

“It’s like having the main entrance to a store open into a closet,” Lindsey said. “Users can still find old Climate.gov pages through side doors like bookmarks or search engines, but when they go to those pages, they see a banner that says the site is no longer being updated or maintained.”

Concurrently, the administration also chose to kill funding for the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and take down its entire website, which was home to all five of the congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments produced since the 1990s.

“The Department of Energy released a biased, non-peer-reviewed report challenging previous scientific assessments on the negative impacts of unchecked global warming,” Lindsey said. “Given what was happening, we felt there was an urgent need for a mature, highly visible online platform to fill the void created by federal science agencies abandoning their 20-plus-year commitment to nonpartisan, public-friendly climate information.”

To fill that void in reliable and accessible climate data and information, Lindsey joined forces with Anna Eshelman, a graphic designer and former artist with NOAA, and Mary Lindsey, a data visualization expert who had helped shape Climate.gov for over a decade, took the opportunity to create a nonprofit successor to Climate.gov: Climate.us.

The Global Climate Dashboard, one of the tools on the Climate.us homepage.

For those who regularly used its predecessor, Climate.us is virtually identical in both content and functionality save for a few technical specs, cosmetic upgrades, and identifiers that would have previously associated the site with the government. However, while the team is working hard to keep up pace with what Climate.gov was before closing down, its status as a nonprofit and its limited staff do slow down the frequency of regular updates. Aside from part-time contributors and volunteers, Lindsey and her two ex-NOAA colleagues who helped start the site are the only three people able to work on it full-time, and a lot of that time still has to go to fundraising. But despite the constraints, the team’s overall mission and goals are still in sight.

“One of our highest priorities is to republish the latest version of the USGCRP’s Climate Literacy Guide,” Lindsey explained. The guide “lays out the concepts and ideas that scientists have agreed are important for individuals and communities to know about Earth’s climate system, impacts of human-caused climate change, and solutions.” This publication was removed from Climate.gov in order to comply with President Trump’s executive orders about diversity and inclusion due to its included information on the concept of climate justice, which, as Lindsey explains, is “the idea that we can take actions to make sure that solutions to climate change are fair.”

Further, the team hopes to identify tools and resources that they can continue to add to Climate.us site. Specifically, they’re looking to publish new maps, graphics, and explainers and relaunch features such as the former website’s “expert blogs,” which helped to provide a direct climate education throughline between site visitors and experts.

Lindsey notes that there are many ways for the public to help support Climate.us and the team behind it.

“We need climate science experts to volunteer for our science panel,” she told me, noting that Climate.gov’s editorial model depended on those volunteer experts. “We also need people to sign up for our newsletter and engage with us on social media—yes, following us, but also actually commenting on, liking, and sharing our content. Like it or loathe it, this engagement is how we raise our profile there as an authoritative, useful source of information, which is how we stand out from the swamp of climate misinformation that lurks online.” And anyone who visits the site can send a message directly to the team saying what’s working or what could be added in order to make sure Climate.us stays relevant to the public.

A wildfire burns in a cypress prairie at Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge. US Fish & Wildlife Service

As we now navigate increasing climate extremes around the globe, including rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, shifting warmth, and—as we’ve seen here in Minnesota—conditions leading to record-breaking numbers of wildfires, the information that Lindsey and her team are making available to the general public is invaluable.

“Climate science is more than research into global warming,” Lindsey said. “Climate scientists are generating knowledge that we can use to prepare for and adapt to natural climate extremes and variability, not just to human-caused changes. You can’t build a wall between the two—natural versus human influences—and say we are only going to study and talk about one of those. At Climate.us, we talk extensively about both, so if you want a broad, nonpartisan understanding about the climate system and how it works, we’re here for you.”