An assortment of NOAA-funded snow and ice data products — considered crucial by many scientists for polar research — are at risk of breaking, degrading or going dark as the Trump administration seeks to cut the agency’s budget and staff.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) decommissioned the products as of Monday, meaning they’ll no longer fund the high-level maintenance that keeps the datasets up and running. That’s according to a Tuesday announcement from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), a polar research institute that’s part of the NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Colorado.
NSIDC houses the decommissioned snow and ice products, which include datasets on global sea ice extent, snow cover and at least 130,000 glaciers around the world. Some of them, like the Sea Ice Index, contain satellite data extending back to the 1970s.
The data products won’t disappear, according to NSIDC’s director, Mark Serreze. And they’ll still be updated with new information. But they won’t be maintained at the same levels as before.
