About 10 former NOAA employees — writers, researchers, and web developers — launched Climate.us, an independent website built to fill the gap left when the Trump administration shut down Climate.gov, the federal government's primary public-facing climate information portal.

The launch is one of the more visible responses to a broader rollback of federal climate data infrastructure. The National Security Archive at George Washington University documented what it called the administration's "denial by erasure" strategy — a systematic reduction of public access to climate-related data and records across federal agencies. Climate.gov's shutdown was one node in that pattern.

The Data Products Going Dark

The Climate.us launch coincided with a string of decisions that have narrowed the federal climate data landscape. NOAA announced in May 2025 that its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product — a benchmark dataset tracking U.S. weather and climate losses since 1980 — would be retired, with no updates beyond calendar year 2024. The dataset had recorded 403 confirmed disaster events exceeding $1 billion each from 1980 through 2024.

That product has been the de facto standard for federal accounting of extreme-weather economic losses. Insurers, emergency managers, congressional appropriators, and academic researchers have all used it as a baseline. Retiring it doesn't erase historical records, but it does end the running tally that gives policymakers and the public a consistent, comparable year-over-year measure of disaster cost trends.

Separately, the National Weather Service began reducing weather balloon launches at eight northern locations following staff cuts driven by the DOGE-linked workforce reductions, according to the Associated Press. Radiosondes — the instrument packages carried by those balloons — feed atmospheric data directly into the numerical weather prediction models that underpin operational forecasting. Fewer launches at high-latitude sites degrade model initialization, with effects that propagate downstream into the forecasts that state emergency managers, aviation, and agriculture depend on.

What Climate.us Can and Can't Replace

The former NOAA staffers behind Climate.us are not a federal agency. They have no authority to compel data collection, no budget for balloon launches, and no mandate to update disaster accounting. What they can do is synthesize and publish — the kind of plain-language science communication that Climate.gov provided and that the agency's communications staff spent years building institutional expertise to do.

That is not a trivial capability. Climate.gov had an established audience and federal credibility behind every piece it published. Climate.us will have to build both from scratch, operating as a nonprofit or independent entity without the implied authority of a .gov domain. For researchers and practitioners who knew where to look inside Climate.gov's archive, the loss is also structural: the site housed datasets, visualizations, and explainers that are not simply reproduced by a new private entity, however expert its staff.

The National Security Archive's "disappearing data" documentation underscores the asymmetry. Removing public access to federal data — even temporarily — creates gaps in the institutional record that are difficult to reconstruct. Private archives can capture snapshots; they cannot replicate the continuous update cycle that made federal datasets authoritative.

The broader context here is that the federal climate information ecosystem is not a single system but a layered one: raw observational data, processed datasets, derived products like the Billion Dollar database, and public communication all sit at different tiers. The rollbacks underway touch all four. Climate.us addresses the communication tier. The observational and processed-data tiers — balloon launches, satellite retrievals, long-term reanalysis products — remain the exclusive province of federal agencies with no independent substitute.

For the practitioners who use this infrastructure daily, the near-term operational question is which datasets and products have credible interim replacements and which do not. Weather balloon data from northern launch sites feeds real-time models; there is no volunteer workforce that can replicate that. The Billion Dollar dataset has partial analogs in academic and insurance-sector tracking, though none carry the same methodological consistency or historical depth. Climate.gov's public science content is closest to what Climate.us can genuinely replace.

The former NOAA staff behind the new site have the subject-matter expertise. Whether they can also build the institutional reach — the distribution, the citations, the routine reliance by downstream users — is a longer-term question the launch itself cannot answer.