You probably won’t believe this, but every month I search for good news to bring you from the “green” front.  This month I had found something a bit cheering, but sometimes a silver lining illuminates a big gray cloud.

First the good news: the National Weather Service (NWS) is predicting a relatively milder 2026 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30. The odds, as calculated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are a 35 percent chance of a “normal” season, a 10 percent chance of an above-normal season, and a 55 percent chance of a below-normal season. 

This year NOAA expects fewer named Atlantic storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes of category 3, 4 or 5.  The NWS cautioned that despite the lower forecast, the public should take steps to prepare for power outages, have a flood evacuation plan, and maintain emergency supplies of food and drinking water for family members and pets.

According to NOAA, the critical factors underlying this year’s hurricane forecast are two phenomena that essentially work in opposition to each other. The first is El Niño, an oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon that starts near the equator in the warm waters of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. El Niño affects temperature and rainfall patterns all around the globe. The second is the expectation of warmer ocean temperatures in the Atlantic this summer. While warmer oceans help storms develop and intensify more quickly, the counteracting effect of El Niño intensifies wind shear, which tends to break up developing storm systems.    

Unfortunately, while the prospect of fewer Atlantic hurricanes is good news for those of us living near the East Coast, a strong El Niño season is bad news for everyone. It brings higher temperatures and rainfall, and more extreme weather events, droughts and heatwaves all around the globe, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).  It’s going to be a long, hot summer.

In the May 21 press release announcing the Atlantic forecast, the Secretary of Commerce touted the remarkable new tools that are helping the U.S. develop more accurate weather forecasts, including advanced forecast modeling and hurricane tracking technologies and other cutting-edge tools. So it’s especially ironic that, just two weeks later, Colorado U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson had to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from dismantling the most important U.S. research facility dedicated to developing those forecasting tools and technologies.

The case involves the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a research and development center founded in 1960 and headquartered in Boulder, CO. NCAR is funded through the National Science Foundation and managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities. The research tools developed by NCAR generate critically important data to forecast hurricanes, monitor space weather, model wildfires and research severe storms. Their innovations include Lidar, used to create high-resolution maps and 3D imaging of the Earth’s surface and the ocean floor; high-performance computing; atmospheric models of weather and climate processes; and numerous datasets. NCAR’s facilities include the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory in Hawai’i, the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, and the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, WY. In addition to NOAA, the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Federal Aviation Administration and NASA all rely on NCAR research.

Last fall, the OMB announced it would dismantle NCAR, citing its “climate alarmism,” and they got to work right away. In March, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research sued in federal court to halt the action, alleging that it was politically motivated. The lawsuit describes OMB efforts to transfer the center’s supercomputing capacity to the University of Wyoming, sell off or transfer its two research aircraft, space weather prediction functions, space weather observing capabilities, weather prediction functions and atmospheric research to private companies and, under political pressure from the OMB, seek proposals to take over the NCAR headquarters building in Boulder.

It’s probably no coincidence that on May 21, the National Science Foundation announced it has also begun dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million array of instruments that monitor ocean conditions and health and also contribute to our understanding of the patterns and impacts of climate change. The so-called “descoping” will remove hundreds of underwater instruments along the West and East coasts, in the Gulf of Alaska and the Irminger Sea between Greenland and Iceland. 

Despite NCAR’s temporary injunction, many scientists fear that the destruction of this vital institution is too far along to be stopped. Important research initiatives were abruptly halted, staff members have taken other jobs, and taxpayer-funded facilities, equipment and foundational research are being privatized. It remains to be seen whether NCAR can be rescued and rebuilt, a pattern that is becoming all too familiar.