A national climate service? Interest builds under Biden

Photo caption: A dog hangs around an abandoned farmhouse in California’s drought-stricken Central Valley. A growing chorus of experts are calling on the federal government to create a national climate service. David McNew / Getty Images. Article by Chelsea Harvey. E&E News – July 6, 2021.

As the George W. Bush administration was drawing to a close, Scott Rayder faced a tough choice. Should he push to fund a new national climate service? Or should he direct those funds instead toward a set of sensitive scientific instruments for the government’s new polar-orbiting satellite system?

At the time, Rayder was chief of staff at NOAA, where the concept of a national climate service had gained traction under NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher. The idea was to establish a central home for federal climate data — which is often scattered across the federal science agencies — with the potential ability to provide long-range climate forecasts and information for climate decision making. […]

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