The University of Colorado Boulder is proposing running the National Center for Atmospheric Research with two partner universities if the National Science Foundation goes forward with a restructuring plan.
CU Boulder outlined the proposal in a letter submitted on March 13, the last day of the NSF’s call for public comments. The authors of the letter are Chancellor Justin Schwartz and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Massimo Ruzzene.
The proposal, first reported by the Boulder Reporting Lab, is for a university-led consortium to manage NCAR that would include the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wyoming. The proposal also keeps NCAR in Boulder where it’s “part of a central hub within the Boulder federal laboratory ecosystem.” It doesn’t include the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of 129 North American universities that manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation.
“Splitting up NCAR resources and functions across organizations would be problematic, financially costly and inefficient,” according to CU Boulder’s letter. “Fragmenting NCAR would destabilize specialized scientific expertise, disrupt modeling and weaken national predictive capacity.”
David Hosansky, the spokesperson for UCAR, declined to comment on the proposal.
The NSF issued the call for public comments after the Trump administration made NCAR in December, and the NSF announced its intent to restructure its critical weather science infrastructure. In January, the NSF announced it would consider proposals for new private or public ownership to take over NCAR’s Mesa Lab in Boulder, and it put out a regarding NCAR’s management and operations.
Other Boulder leaders and organizations demanding the NSF stop all plans to restructure NCAR.
CU Boulder’s initial plan has the university contributing expertise in atmospheric chemistry, climate science, space weather, wildfire and drought science, and Earth system modeling. The University of Oklahoma would contribute leadership in meteorology, severe weather and advanced radar technology. The University of Wyoming would contribute strengths in high-performance computing and large-scale Earth system modeling infrastructure.
“Such a consortium would significantly expand national scientific capacity while maintaining the integrated capabilities that make NCAR uniquely valuable,” according to the letter.
Dismantling NCAR or turning it into a for-profit organization could destroy its unique function of bridging the mission-driven research of federal agencies, such as NASA, with the investigator-led scientific inquiry of universities, according to the letter.
“NCAR’s community modeling frameworks, observational facilities, aircraft platforms, and cyber infrastructure enable coordinated research at the national scale,” according to the letter. “These shared capabilities allow scientists across the United States to access sophisticated tools that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive and inefficient for individual institutions to maintain independently.”
