Climate Service, we hardly knew ye.

The proposal to reorganize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate change portfolio, introduced by the White House last year with great fanfare, is nowhere to be found in President Obama's fiscal 2013 budget request.

NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco and other administration officials promoted the plan as a "no-cost" step to consolidate climate work into a new office that could better handle the increasing demand for climate change-related information.

House Republicans took a dimmer view, inserting riders into fiscal 2011 and 2012 spending bills to prevent NOAA from making the Climate Service plan a reality. The chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Texas Republican Ralph Hall, even launched an investigation to determine whether NOAA had flouted lawmakers' wishes by moving forward with the reorganization without authorization.

But with the Climate Service conspicuously absent from the president's 2013 budget request, a NOAA official says the plan is officially dead.

"Congress spoke clearly in their [2012] appropriation in which it denied the administration's request to form a Climate Service within NOAA," said agency spokesman Scott Smullen. "NOAA is working within our existing authorities to provide climate products and services as efficiently and effectively as possible."

That includes seeking to reverse recent cuts to the agency's climate research account. The White House budget released yesterday proposes a total of $212 million for climate research, a $29 million increase from 2012 and roughly in line with the 2010 and 2011 funding levels.

$2B for satellites

The request would also bolster NOAA's satellite division. It proposes spending roughly $2 billion on orbiters, including $916 million for the struggling Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS).

Deep budget cuts in 2011 caused the satellite effort to fall behind schedule, making a future gap in crucial weather and climate data a near certainty, according to NOAA and the Government Accountability Office.

After intense lobbying by NOAA, lawmakers agreed to award the program $924 million last year, just shy of the Obama administration's $1.070 billion request (ClimateWire, Nov. 17, 2011).

Agency officials believed that would help firm up the JPSS launch schedule and limit the duration of the projected future data gap. Now they're warning there's no margin for error.

"Funding JPSS is required to ensure public safety and homeland security," says a Commerce Department budget document released yesterday. "This funding will maintain a calendar year 2017 launch date for JPSS to minimize any potential gap in polar satellite coverage. ... Full funding is required to avoid any additional schedule slip and to minimize the gap between missions."

The administration proposal would keep NOAA's overall budget relatively flat, at $5.1 billion, compared to the $4.9 billion it received in 2012. The plan would cut funding for the agency's oceans and fisheries accounts, as well as the National Weather Service.