London tornado researcher concerned changes at U.S. weather centre could disrupt cross-border research

CBC

19-02-2025

New, restrictive policy directives aimed at U.S. climate and weather scientists have some Canadian researchers concerned about the future of their work and the future of a field that relies heavily on open data and cross-border collaboration.
Emails seen by CBC News show staff at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being directed to submit for review any correspondence with international counterparts that are scientific in nature and involve scientific data.
The emails from NOAA's policy team, which were first reported by Wired, also direct employees to receive senior approval on "all upcoming international engagements" until the end of March. They must also submit any virtual meetings for review if they touch on particular topics, such as climate.
"I'd say it's noticeably quieter. We're not getting a lot of emails from people that are working under NOAA," said David Sills, director of the Northern Tornadoes Project (NTP), based out of Western University in London, Ont.
Sills said NTP hadn't heard anything official from anyone at NOAA about the changes but notes their researchers deal "quite a bit" with colleagues in the U.S. on a fairly regular basis.
He expressed concern the directives could throw into question a planned summer conference on radar meteorology and five years of work developing a new enhanced Fujita scale (EF) for rating tornadoes, both done in collaboration with the U.S.
"From what we've seen, everything seems not to be stopped but just 'under review.' We don't know what that means. Maybe they don't know what that means. But, of course, everything that we're hearing is worrying as far as future relationships."
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Data and research conducted by NOAA are intertwined with work done by Canadian climatologists and meteorologists, including at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
The federal agency collaborates with NOAA through several initiatives, including the North American Ensemble Forecast System. The federal government told CBC News that it hadn't received any official notice of changes to its collaboration with NOAA.
NTP doesn't receive any research funding from NOAA, and hasn't been directly impacted in that way like other universities, including the University of Windsor. Western University says none of its researchers currently receive NOAA funding.
The research team does rely on NOAA resources in its work.
NOAA manages a comprehensive network of weather radars, as well as two high-resolution weather satellites under the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite Program, or GOES, which launched 50 years ago this October.
"I mean, we don't have any Canadian weather satellites that we can use every day for weather and for research," he said.
Up until now, that data has been freely available for anyone to use.
But as concerns mount about looming mass layoffs at NOAA and other U.S. agencies, part of a push by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to drastically scale back the federal workforce, largely without scrutiny, it's unclear if that will continue.
In recent weeks, dozens of U.S. government web pages and data sets have been pulled from the internet by the Trump administration, prompting a guerilla effort to save them.
"I don't think the data will stop. I hope not. But it's not out of the question that they will start charging a lot of money for this critical data, and that's certainly a concern," Sills said.
The situation has led to a "chilling effect" across the board that has impacted every aspect of the work NTP does, Sills said, including collaboration with U.S. scientists outside NOAA who get funding through the National Science Foundation (NSF).
On Tuesday, 11 per cent of NSF's staff was laid off, according to a Bloomberg report.
In a statement to CBC News, Rachel Hager, NOAA Fisheries spokesperson, denied federal scientists had been ordered to stop communicating with international counterparts.