Newsmakers Oct. 17-30: As budget stagnates, staff shrinks at NCAR

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), one of the world’s premier climate research institutions, has been struggling to maintain its ground-breaking scientific initiatives in an era of stagnant budgets and a staff that has shrunk to its lowest level in more than a decade.

This year, NCAR has 804 full-time staffers, down from its high of 880 in 2009. In 2013, it spent $165.8 million, down about 3 percent from $171.3 million in 2009, according to its budget and planning office.

However, the agency’s headcount and expenditure have varied dramatically during the past decade, according to the NCAR’s budget and planning office.

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NCAR is an international leader in climate research, as well as meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, and solar-terrestrial interactions.

For decades, the institution has relied on funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is a U.S. government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering.

However, that funding has been relatively flat or sub-inflationary for much of the past 10 years.

Beside NSF funding, NCAR also receives funding from other agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and those funding streams have been highly variable as well, NCAR’s director Jim Hurrell said.

Linda Mearns, the Director of the Weather and Climate Impacts Assessment Science Program (WCIASP) and a senior scientist at NCAR, said that she’s witnessed a decline of NSF funding and a dramatic increase of funding from other sources, which is called “soft money,” over the past few years.

“I can’t say that the soft funding is dramatically going up… But if you suddenly take out the soft money, NCAR will just collapse,” Mearns said.

According to NCAR’s budget office, the spending of soft money at NCAR has increased from $61.2 million in 2004 to $69.6 million in 2014. However, its proportion of total spending has remained flat, at about 42 percent.

“If the overall funding situation into NCAR continues to stay flat or decline, we are going to continue to face tough decisions,” Hurrell said.

UPDATE

NCAR officials expect to see a small uptick in federal funding next year.

Jim Hurrell, director of NCAR, said that the agency expects to see an increase of 3.2 percent in its federal funding in 2015.

With limited funding, NCAR’s management team has attempted to focus on projects with the highest priority, which includes the modeling systems, the data simulation systems and its work in observational science using data collected from radars and satellites.