Some of the country’s most widely used sea ice data products could be in jeopardy as the government shutdown drags on and agencies wait for Congress to agree on a federal spending plan.
That’s because of a lapse in federal funding for the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s popular sea ice website, whose tools and graphics help the public track long-term changes in the world’s melting polar regions. NSIDC is a polar science institute housed at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado. It conducts research and provides open data on the planet’s snow and ice.
Much of NSIDC’s work is funded through a large renewable contract from NASA. The institute is currently funded through March, according to Director Mark Serreze — meaning most of its regular operations likely will continue through the shutdown. And most of the satellite information NSIDC relies on for its snow and ice data analyses “comes in fairly much automatically,” he added.
But NSIDC manages and maintains its sea ice tools and data products through a separate funding stream, typically secured through unsolicited proposals to NASA that’s independent of the main contract. The latest funding agreement for the sea ice site ended this year, and NASA has yet to approve a new one.
