By The Straits Times | Created at 2025-03-24 14:50:46 | Updated at 2025-04-05 01:08:36
1 week ago
BENGALURU/JAKARTA - In a research laboratory in one of India’s top technical institutes in the western Indian state of Gujarat, civil and computer science engineer Udit Bhatia is growing anxious as political events unfolding 12,400km away put his work in jeopardy.
The Trump administration’s ongoing budget cuts in US federal agencies are threatening to disrupt worldwide weather and ocean measurements that are vital to global governments and agencies in forecasting and early warnings, and disaster resilience research done by the likes of Dr Bhatia.
Dr Bhatia studies how climate variability impacts cities, urban infrastructure and transportation systems. His team of 22 at the Centre for Sustainable Development at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, has advised municipalities of Bhavnagar and Surat cities as well as government agencies including the Indian railways on how to manage and recover from natural disasters.
Most of the critical datasets that Dr Bhatia’s lab relies on are generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), America’s primary oceanic science and meteorological body.
NOAA’s National Centres for Environmental Information monitors and archives more than 229 terabytes of data on temperature, precipitation, wind speeds and humidity levels every month from over 130 observing platforms across the globe, including those in the Indian Ocean that are relevant for Dr Bhatia.
Such crucial climate information may soon become inaccessible or less accurate, amid major staff and budget cuts at NOAA. In late February, more than 1,000 of its employees were laid off in US President Donald Trump’s mass overhaul and downsizing of the federal government, to save “wasted” taxpayer money.
Even as a district judge ordered a temporary block on the termination of tens of thousands of federal positions across 12 departments on March 14, more job cuts and defunding loom over the NOAA.
Any unavailability of this data will reduce the “ability to track rapid changes in the ocean that often precede extreme weather”, said Dr Roxy Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, India.
“In the long run, if observational gaps persist, the accuracy of climate and weather predictions worldwide could suffer,” he added.
Dr Bhatia, too, said that the moment NOAA’s high-quality datasets stop getting updated and slow down, “it will compromise calibration and valuation of data that aid weather predictions across the Global South. Unless we do benchmarking of models, we cannot comment on the future”.
Why NOAA is critical
The consequences of the cutbacks at NOAA are potentially disastrous for the Asian region, especially regions vulnerable to cyclones, forest fires and heat waves, experts told ST.
Till now, the NOAA has been the world’s highest-funded, most comprehensive oceanic observer and climate data archiver. Climate scientists, oceanographers and city planners around the world have long relied on its massive data archives and climate forecast models seamlessly threaded into the wider global weather infrastructure.
Singapore’s sea-level rise predictions, for instance, rely heavily on NOAA data, said Dr Benjamin Horton, director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore, which conducts research on earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and climate change in South-east Asia.
The lack of such data will have “far-reaching consequences, as solving climate change is more urgent than ever”, he told ST.
Being unable to accurately predict extreme weather events will impact a country’s ability to prepare for them.PHOTO: EPA-EFE
“In the past 80 years, the US has been putting more money into the physical sciences than the rest of the world put together. The world’s understanding of sea levels, the biosphere, ice sheets and atmosphere has been funded primarily by the US,” said Dr Horton.
Asian countries like India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan make meteorological calculations based on the data generated by the buoys, satellites and instruments owned and operated in the Indian Ocean by the NOAA.
The most immediate impacts of disruptions in the NOAA workforce may be felt in ocean observation systems.
This would weaken India’s forecasts of the monsoon, the single most important weather phenomenon affecting the subcontinent. Monsoon data is crucial for farming decisions in the country’s largely rain-fed agriculture and to predict inflation.
Effects on India
“If NOAA reduces observations, there will be implications for weather forecasts. When ocean observations are reduced, there is less data to assimilate. Hence, predictability will be reduced,” Dr M. Ravichandran, Secretary of India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, told the Press Trust of India on March 2.
India has its own climate observation infrastructure, but from 2009, it has also used NOAA’s ocean and atmospheric data to forecast the monsoon. From 2012, India closely collaborated with NOAA to monitor tropical cyclones, and in 2024, they co-developed a life-saving forecast model to monitor multiple cyclones in the same ocean basin.
Indian and American scientists together maintain a global network of buoys and instruments in the Indian Ocean that record sea surface temperature, currents, salinity and sea levels. India also runs a joint data portal with NOAA.
Dr Koll estimated that the NOAA “contributes to 40 to 50 per cent of the ocean observations” in the Indian Ocean.
Satellite data from NOAA, like those from its Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites that provide continuous imagery and data on atmospheric conditions and solar activity, play a major role in monitoring sea surface temperatures and atmospheric conditions.
People wade through a flooded street after heavy rains in Chennai on Dec 6, 2023.PHOTO: AFP
Dr Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, a former director of the Indian Meteorological Department, said that if the NOAA does not have the funds or manpower to maintain the Indian Ocean observing systems, “it will lead to data blind spots in the ocean”.
Such gaps emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. He added: “Without maintenance, the instruments in the ocean failed, observations were reduced, and it impacted the quality of forecast in India.”
India might now have to “build redundancies to avoid such overnight handicaps”, which means using weather data from the European Union and China in the short term, and investing more in its own climate infrastructure and research, said Dr Rajeevan.
Effects on Asia
NOAA’s data and scientific collaborations with several countries in Asia help develop and constantly improve analytical models that accurately predict weather events. These include a cyclone’s direction and landfall, or a heat wave’s intensity and date, explained earth systems scientist Raghu Murtugudde, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland.
Globally, “every department – from transportation, military, agriculture, health, energy and aviation – looks at weather forecasts”, he said. “But not many countries have the resources to invest billions on climate monitoring and modelling, so at least 70 to 80 per cent of them depend on the NOAA data.”
Being unable to accurately predict extreme weather events such as cyclones will impact a country’s ability to prepare for them, leading to “unquantifiable losses” in lives and infrastructure, Dr Murtugudde said.
In Indonesia, Dr Krisdianto, the Ministry of Forestry’s head of public relations and international cooperation, told ST that the country uses “fundamental satellite data to monitor forest and land fires in Indonesia”.
He said the country is strengthening cooperation with other agencies such as the European Space Agency, the Japan Space Agency and other monitoring agencies to get affordable, convenient and fast-monitoring services, amid the country’s limited budget.
“In addition to the satellite monitoring system, we could also step up ground monitoring via patrols, public campaigns to encourage villagers to help watch out for and prevent fires in their respective neighbourhoods, and to report early to the authorities whenever a fire emerges,” added Dr Krisdianto, who goes by one name.
The head of Indonesia’s weather agency Dwikorita Karnawati told ST that it has long relied on NOAA’s buoy observations in the Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean for weather and climate predictions, and any staff cuts in the division responsible for maintaining and analysing buoy data could have an impact.
These data are used in weather and climate prediction models, including El Nino-Southern Oscillation, Indian Ocean Dipole, and Madden-Julian Oscillation.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, which also operates under NOAA, could be affected as well, potentially impacting early tsunami warnings in the Pacific Ocean.
Dr Murtugudde said that Mr Trump’s “sledgehammer to the NOAA” is worrying, but it is a reminder that we need redundancies in global and regional data gathering “to protect the overall prediction enterprise from political vagaries”.
“A globally coordinated climate predictions system, beyond national borders and bilateral engagements, is the only way to bring about higher resolution models and more accurate predictions for all countries. It will help all governments respond better to the rising number of extreme climate events,” he added.
- Rohini Mohan is The Straits Times’ India Correspondent based in Bengaluru. She covers politics, business and human rights in the South Asian region.
- Wahyudi Soeriaatmadja has been Indonesia correspondent at The Straits Times since 2008, and is based in Jakarta.
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