There are no climate havens for our climate data
(NCEI)
The terrifying days directly preceding and following the back-to-back hurricanes of Helene and Milton have prompted renewed discussion of when community members in the paths of such storms should make the gut-wrenching call to evacuate their homes. Yet even as residents were agonizing over these decisions over the last few weeks, climate scientists around the world were waking up to their own sobering reality, discovering on September 27th that Hurricane Helene had disrupted one of their most important sources of climate data.
The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) headquarters, located in Asheville, North Carolina, maintains and updates one of the largest trackers of oceanic, atmospheric, geophysical, and coastal data, including NOAA’s list of billion-dollar climate and weather disasters. Hurricane Helene, now considered the deadliest hurricane in the contiguous United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, damaged an estimated 80% of buildings in Asheville’s once-vibrant River Arts District and shut down services nearby at NCEI after the center’s cooling system (which depends on the city’s municipal water network) which suffered catastrophic damage in the storm.
Thankfully, all of NCEI’s Asheville staff are safe. But the flooding pushed the repository offline at a time when the public needed these data the most—to inform models, statistics, and decision-making. My own foray into this muddy morass occurred as I sought monthly precipitation data for a project on West Nile virus surveillance efforts in the United States, only to find that my usual source of reliable, up-to-date data was no longer reliable nor up-to-date. Though my specific experience as a PhD student who studies climate and disease is by no means the principal consequence of the climate data center moving offline, it highlights not just the on-the-nose plight of needing climate data in a time of climate disaster, but also the downstream effects of such a shutdown. In addition to my own conundrum (shoutout to PRISM Climate Data for helping in a pinch), other scientists had to press pause on research activities as wide-ranging as light pollution and dark skies, global tropical cyclones, and ocean temperatures.
It was also galling to read news articles on Helene and Milton, narratives that influence public opinion and trust on evacuation decision-making, recovery efforts, and climate science, only to find key gaps in the data the reporters wanted to cite. Writing for The New Yorker, for example, Elizabeth Kolbert invokes the work of Cornell atmospheric scientist Jonathan Lin, whose latest analyses were included across a number of media outlets: “In a grim irony, data about water temperatures in the Gulf are hard to come by right now, because Hurricane Helene, which hit less than two weeks ago, damaged the offices of the group that normally supplies the figures—the National Centers for Environmental Information, headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina.”
Beyond Climate Science
Most individuals may not realize how much of their lives are touched by NCEI data: NCEI’s environmental data are utilized across the public and private sectors, including in insurance, transportation, energy, agriculture, legal services, water resources, retail, ecosystem health, and journalism, to name a few. NASA incorporates NCEI data to estimate global average monthly temperatures, farmers rely on NOAA satellite and radar data to optimize their operations, utility companies need its weather and climate data to predict energy demand, and the financial sector has confidence in NCEI information to set insurance premiums and payouts.
As Axios reported, the NCEI Asheville office is far from the first federal asset to be damaged by climate-linked disasters, with Missouri River floodwater heavily damaging Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska in 2019 and Hurricane Michael destroying significant components of Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida in 2018 (the proposed cost to rebuild Tyndall was estimated at $4.9 billion and rebuilding is ongoing). I also fear what’s to come, with California wildfires forcing the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center to evacuate in 2018, and data centers clustered in hurricane-susceptible cities like Houston and Tampa. The mere existence of government assets and data repositories in areas at high risk from natural disasters is a danger to all the people and services that rely on them. And given that even the government agency most attuned to climate adaptation, the Department of Defense, has experienced the near-destruction of entire military bases, the question of whether the rest of the government can begin to catch up does not go far enough.
(Before and after images of Tyndall Air Force Base, DigitalGlobe)
In addition to potentially fueling further misinformation and conspiracy theories about Helene and Milton, which chip away at trust in federal and state government, what most alarms me is how events like Helene could contribute to disinvestment in data sources like NCEI’s—sources that are considered the cornerstone for weather and climate data insights. As Robert Rohde, chief scientist for Berkeley Earth, put it, “They’re not the only source of this data, but they are by far the most convenient, in that they remove the difficulty of needing to talk to lots of different weather agencies around the world.” Without these data sets, scientists may be forced to turn to less reliable or comprehensive (and potentially costly) data, which in turn may produce less reliable insights.
(X.com)
At a time when public trust in government is hovering at near-record lows and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for dismantling NOAA’s climate science work (with such funding cuts further diminishing its reliability), protection of NCEI’s work is more important than ever. As a spokesperson for a former Florida emergency management director under Governor Ron DeSantis put it, “while Project 2025 does not call for the complete dismantling of the NOAA, it intends to undermine the agency’s independence from the executive branch and eliminate many of its internal departments. Any threats toward the NOAA or NWS jeopardizes life-saving information about hurricanes, heat waves, and other extreme weather events.” And as Rachel Cleetus, policy director in the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, remarked, “The idea that [NOAA] could be broken up and somehow still be able to do this essential work, it won’t be possible.”
Playing Catch-Up
That urgency is only heightened by the yearly escalation of climate-related disasters. The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) new report on federal climate risk exposure finds that not only will climate damages likely cost the U.S. government trillions of dollars per decade, but also that federal agencies currently have limited ability to report and manage their climate-related fiscal risks.
With the GAO report and the devastation of Hurricanes Milton and Helene fresh in the minds of lawmakers, it is my hope that the next session of Congress will authorize investment into (and further expansion of) climate resiliency efforts, which will serve as the backbone of a coordinated climate resiliency plan. However, the barriers to federal government adaptation to climate change–including congressional willingness, the often slow-moving, unwieldy nature of government action, and growing mistrust in government–make it harder to move the democratic apparatus in directions that are needed.
Just as many residents across recent hurricane-struck regions assumed that their homes could survive the storms, so too did the federal government when it moved its NCEI offices from humid, flood-prone New Orleans to Asheville in the 1950s. I, too, had never questioned my faith in the government’s data infrastructure. Just as there are no climate havens, there are no climate databases that could not be made more resilient through strategic and forward-looking adaptation. Indeed, it is perhaps the only way they’ll be accessible come the next climate-worsened disaster.
Note: As of publication time on November 22, 2024, a status update on the NCEI website warns: “Most products and services now have a complete historical record, however a few datasets continue to be recovered after the impacts of Hurricane Helene. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
— Torre Lavelle