1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

I write to urge you to protect the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a cornerstone of America’s weather, climate, and public-safety infrastructure. NCAR is not a political advocacy organization. It is a federally funded research center created to solve problems that no single university, agency, or private company is structured to handle alone. Its mission is to develop foundational science, tools, and models that are shared openly across the nation’s forecasting, aviation, water, energy, and emergency-management systems. NCAR’s work underpins daily weather forecasts and severe-storm warnings relied upon by the National Weather Service, airlines, farmers, utilities, and first responders. Advances in hurricane tracking, aviation wind-shear detection, and severe-storm modeling that originated at NCAR have directly improved safety and saved lives. These contributions are not speculative—they are historically documented and operationally embedded. Equally important, NCAR serves as a national hub for collaboration. It develops and maintains community models and data systems used by researchers and forecasters across the United States. This prevents fragmentation, duplication, and loss of interoperability in a field where coordination and shared standards are essential. Eliminating NCAR would not simply “move research elsewhere”; it would disrupt an integrated ecosystem built over decades. NCAR also trains the scientific workforce that staffs weather offices, emergency agencies, and private forecasting firms nationwide. Its fellowships, internships, and open training programs ensure that cutting-edge science rapidly becomes operational capability. No institution is beyond improvement, and oversight and reform are appropriate. But dismantling or defunding NCAR would introduce unnecessary risk, degrade forecasting capacity, and ultimately cost more to replace than to maintain. At a time of increasing weather extremes, weakening our predictive infrastructure would be a profound strategic mistake. I respectfully urge Congress to block any effort to dismantle NCAR and to ensure stable, long-term funding for its research and training mission in the interest of public safety, economic resilience, and national preparedness.