Economy & Economic Development  October 17, 2014

As budget stagnates, staff shrinks at NCAR

One of the country’s largest climate research facilities, Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR,) is struggling to maintain its rich research environment in an era of stagnant budgets and a staff that has shrunk to its lowest level in more than a decade.

“We have to think very strategically about where we invest our money,” said Jim Hurrell, director of NCAR. “The reality is we’ve had staff layoffs because the budget pressures have become higher.”

During the past decade, NCAR’s headcount has varied dramatically, according to NCAR’s budget and planning office. The agency now employs 804 full-time staffers, down from its high of 880 in 2009.

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“I think all institutions across the country that receive federal funding for research have been experiencing many of these pressures. It’s not unique to NCAR,” Hurrell said.

In 2013, NCAR spent $165.8 million, down about 3 percent from $171.3 million in 2009, without considering inflation, according to the budget and planning office.

Research power house

Nestled against the foothills just below the Flatirons, NCAR has been an international leader in climate research, as well as meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, and solar-terrestrial interactions.

For decades, NCAR, managed by a consortium of universities, 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.

But that funding has been relatively flat or sub-inflationary for much of the past decade.

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, 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.

With limited funding, NCAR’s management team has focused 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.

“We are facing some very difficult decisions,” Hurrell said. “We make a decision that one area is a strategic priority that we’re going to support, it means we can no longer support another area of our research.”

Mearns’ current project, called the North America Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (North America CORDEX), requires about $12 million over the course of three to four years, but she said that her team has nothing so far.

CORDEX, a collaborative project among NCAR, universities, government agencies and government science labs, is about coordinating experiments with regional climate models to get higher resolution, localized data on climate change.

Mearns’ work is about showing people what climate change would look like, both globally and regionally, in 50 years. The higher the resolution, the more accurate the predictions.

“It would be a large community effort and would cost a lot of money to archive and process all the data from the simulations so that they can be presentable and easy for the larger community to use,” she said.

Mearns said that it’s not easy to get grants due to increasing competition in the science field, but she hopes that there will be a more unified funding plan for projects like hers.

“One of the problems is that the U.S. is undecided about how to go about creating climate scenarios. I’ve been disappointed that there hasn’t been a more centralized effort to get these kinds of activities going. My perception is that the agencies are not very unified. They are very dedicated to their own agency mission but are not very interested in cooperating,” she said.

Looking ahead, Hurrell said that the real challenge NCAR faces is the “considerable budget uncertainty.”

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

“At the same time, I’m an optimist. I fundamentally believe that the work we do is extremely important, and I’m not ready to roll over and just say that ‘this is the future that we face.’”

One of the country’s largest climate research facilities, Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR,) is struggling to maintain its rich research environment in an era of stagnant budgets and a staff that has shrunk to its lowest level in more than a decade.

“We have to think very strategically about where we invest our money,” said Jim Hurrell, director of NCAR. “The reality is we’ve had staff layoffs because the budget pressures have become higher.”

During the past decade, NCAR’s headcount has varied dramatically, according to NCAR’s budget and planning office. The agency now employs…

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