In late February, the United States administration, led by President Donald Trump, laid off around 800 workers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the country’s primary climate and weather forecasting body.
Among those watching the move with concern was Raghu Murtugudde, an earth scientist and a retired professor of the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, as well as emeritus professor of the University of Maryland.
Murtugudde had a particular interest in understanding how warming temperatures are impacting the Indian Ocean and the annual monsoon rainfall dependent on it. For this, he often relied on data generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“India is nowhere close to the global data that NOAA collects,” said Murtugudde. He explained, for instance, that the NOAA publishes comprehensive data on ocean temperatures across the globe, as well as salinity and sea levels.
This information is crucial not just for his research, Murtugudde said – it underpins most meteorological calculations in India, including the forecast of the monsoon.
“While making longer term forecasts for monsoons, we have to take into account the ocean and its parameters, because they control the atmosphere,” he said.
The monsoon is the single-most important weather phenomenon affecting the Indian subcontinent. Accurate forecasts are crucial for farming decisions and to predict inflation – a normal monsoon typically limits inflation, while deficit or excess monsoons can lead to high rates of inflation.
Until 2009, India’s monsoon forecasting relied solely on atmospheric indicators such as heat and moisture to predict cloud formation and precipitation. With help from NOAA, India then moved to a forecasting system that uses ocean data along with atmospheric data.
“We got the knowledge of the model from NOAA,” Murtugudde said. “Then, we took that model and made it more specific to the Indian monsoon.” It is this model that the Indian Meteorological Department now uses each year for its seasonal forecast for the monsoon, which it typically issues in April, and which predicts the general picture of monthly rainfall of the upcoming monsoon season.
“Agreements between the countries make sure that the knowledge transfer continues, but this could obviously be affected if the Trump administration decides to cut this funding off,” said Murtugudde.
Indian scientists fear that it is not just the monsoon that would become more difficult to forecast but even extreme weather events like cyclones, impacting the country’s ability to prepare for them.
‘Climate change alarm’
Although the NOAA is an American organisation, it generates global data on temperature, rainfall and other environment conditions through its instruments and platforms in the oceans, along with satellites. This data is accessed by meteorological agencies and research institutions across the world.
The organisation’s origins lie in the United States’ efforts to provide data for improved navigation for mariners at a time when shipping was the predominant form of transport.
The NOAA functions under the United States’ department of commerce since it is responsible for supporting marine commerce, as well as issuing warnings for severe storms. It is also responsible for daily weather forecasting and climate monitoring, and for coastal restoration through the conservation of marine sanctuaries protecting habitats.
The recommendation for downsizing the body was made in Project 2025, a 900-page policy blueprint prepared in April 2023 by Heritage Foundation, an American think tank. The foundation has been influential – a year after Trump’s first term, it claimed that the White House had adopted nearly two-thirds of its proposals.
In the document, Heritage Foundation stated that the NOAA received more than 50% of the commerce department’s annual operational budget of $12 billion. It described the body as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity”. It then suggested that the NOAA should be “broken up and downsized”.
In the recent round of lay-offs, announced on February 28 as a part of the department of government efficiency’s efforts to slash the United States’ federal workforce, the Trump administration sent termination letters to approximately 5% of NOAA’s employees, by one calculation. The cuts have resulted in shrinking of teams across all of the organisation’s verticals.
Some impacts of the terminations are already visible – on the same day as they were announced, NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory announced on X, “Due to a reduction in staff, NOAA GLERL’s communications services will be taking an indefinite hiatus.”
Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, described the ways in which reducing personnel would affect meteorological work around the world. “There will be fewer people monitoring, which will degrade the observing systems over a couple of years,” he said.
Koll explained, for instance, that platforms across oceans that collect atmospheric and oceanic data need servicing at least every three years. These platforms are vulnerable to weather elements, and without maintenance, could get covered in algae, or damaged by cyclones, which could impact their data collection.
“Without the money and people to replace or service these platforms, it will impact the accuracy of data that countries like India receive,” said Koll.
Impacts in India
NOAA has not just provided India help with its monsoon forecast model, its equipment has been crucial to India’s ability to forecast monsoons.
For instance, moored buoys carrying floating instruments of the NOAA have helped generate a wealth of data for this purpose, said Suryachandra Rao from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune.
He explained that a recent publication showed that if data is not collected through these instruments, “the monsoon predictions will go wrong, at least on seasonal or long-range predictions”.
Rao, who is also on the Monsoon Panel at CLIVAR, a network of scientists across the world that works on the role of oceans in climate variability, added that the data is also important for predictions of El Nino, a climatic phenomenon linked to ocean temperatures and wind patterns, which impacts countries across the world. Thus the data is “not only important for India, but worldwide”, Rao said.
Scientists also fear that the cuts at the agency could hurt India’s ability to accurately forecast cyclones.
Specifically, they worry that the changes could affect plans that the NOAA and India’s ministry of earth sciences drew up in 2024 to work together to develop a weather prediction system for the Indian seas that would help in severe weather modelling and cyclone predictions.
This move was itself a culmination of a 12-year long partnership between the two countries, through which they monitored weather conditions in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. While both the United States and India had instruments and satellites to collect oceanic data from the region, the NOAA generates far higher volumes of data.
“NOAA contributes to about 40% of the subsurface observations in the Indian Ocean, while India contributes about 11%,” said Rao.
Analysing such a body of data together allows scientists to generate up-to-date information every six hours about phenomena such as wind systems and other conditions linked to the strengthening of cyclones, Koll explained. “If we do not know how the cyclone has intensified in the last six hours, then during the landfall, people might face stronger winds than expected,” he said.
Climate projections
Apart from helping predict current phenomena, NOAA also has climate data for the last century, which makes it an invaluable resource for the world to analyse how weather and climate are changing, said Koll.
“A lot of India’s climate projections for the future, like how the heatwaves will be in 2030 or up till 2100, or how rainfall or sea level will change, is dependent on this data from NOAA,” said Koll. He explained that these climate projections are also then used in crucial analyses, like those published in the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and climate change reports that India prepares. “This data, therefore, is used for policies that focus on climate adaptation and mitigation,” he said.
Koll also noted that the layoffs at NOAA come at a time when conversations among scientists and policymakers were focused on the need to expand the scope of such platforms and bodies “because climate change is making the weather more chaotic, and with more heat and moisture, the weather fluctuates more”. In this context, more satellites and instruments were the need of the hour, to monitor these weather systems and ocean atmospheric systems, he explained.
“The current conditions at NOAA could mean a blow to that,” said Koll. “It will surely degrade our global climate research.”
