February 17, 2017 — On Feb. 5, Congressional Republicans, led by Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chair of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, released a press release asserting that one study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — which found a hypothesized “hiatus” in the planet’s warming trend to be nonexistent — was incorrect. According to the press release, NOAA “retroactively altered historical climate change data (which) resulted in the elimination of a well-known climate phenomenon known as the ‘climate change hiatus.’” The press release cited an interview with former NOAA employee John Bates in the British tabloid Daily Mail.
The research done by current NOAA scientists, and published in the prestigious research journal Science in June 2015, concluded that the “hiatus” was an artifact of the source of their sea surface temperature measurements, and not an actual reflection of climate trends. The new work presented a more accurate climate change model based on a comprehensive look at available global data.
It’s not the first time the agency has gotten tied up in political wrangling. NOAA was created in 1970 when former President Richard Nixon combined several federal agencies. Its roots stretch back to the 1800s, though, when Americans began to make large scale, coordinated efforts to take the measure of their world: Their financial wellbeing—and their lives—depended on it. The young nation lacked even the most basic standardized information about its weather or coasts. Early agencies that eventually became NOAA worked to fill the gaps. These efforts have not always been well received in the halls of government.
In 1870, for example, former President Ulysses Grant created the Office of Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries — precursor to NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service, which regulates the nation’s commercial and recreational ocean fishing — to investigate why Eastern commercial fisheries were collapsing. Some Congressional Republicans ridiculed the idea, moving to include an investigation into the state of the nation’s grasshoppers and potato bugs.
Political drama aside, NOAA’s mission is to “understand and predict changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources.” High Country News recently asked Waleed Abdalati, director of the University of Colorado’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) — a joint program with NOAA based in Boulder — to explain NOAA’s work and how it impacts Westerners. Research topics at CIRES range from the effects of climate change on Western water to the effects of hydraulic fracturing on air quality.
Abdalati, a former chief scientist for NASA, got his PhD from the University of Colorado in 1996 for work on the Greenland ice sheet. Today, his graduate students continue those studies, trying to understand how its melt contributes to rising sea levels.
High Country News: What kinds of things does NOAA do out West?
Waleed Abdalati: We say NOAA’s “from the surface of the sun to bottom of the ocean and everything in between.”
We have a global monitoring division here that basically monitors what’s in our air and where it came from — things like ozone, methane released from fracking, trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
We’re also developing systems that improve weather forecasts and systems, and help us understand how our climate is changing and why, and the implications for water resources out West.
An aspect of NOAA’s work that doesn’t get a lot of attention is the Space Weather Prediction Center. A lot of people don’t realize the sun has weather! Our satellite systems, our navigation systems – a lot of the electronics that we rely on – are vulnerable to major events from solar activity. So there’s a whole enterprise here that’s working to understand what the sun is doing.
Another area that NOAA works in is called the National Centers for Environmental Information, which are the stewards of environmental information.