NOAA announces plans to restructure its climate research programs and shut its climate.gov portal

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced plans to restructure its climate research program, close the publicly accessible climate.gov portal that had provided Americans with official government climate data and educational materials for years, and reduce the staff of its climate science divisions. Climate scientists within NOAA described the restructuring as a dismantling of the agency's climate research capacity under the cover of administrative reorganization. The climate.gov portal had been one of the federal government's primary tools for communicating peer-reviewed climate science to the public and policymakers. Its planned closure removed a major source of official information about sea level rise, temperature trends, and extreme weather patterns from the government's public-facing web presence.