About 10 former NOAA employees — writers, researchers, and web developers — launched Climate.us, an independent website built to replace Climate.gov after the Trump administration shut it down. Climate.gov had been the federal government's main public source for climate information.

The launch is one of the more visible responses to what the National Security Archive at George Washington University documented as the administration's "denial by erasure" strategy — a systematic reduction of public access to climate-related data and records across federal agencies.

The Data Products Going Dark

Climate.us came online as NOAA announced it would retire its Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product in May 2025. This dataset tracked U.S. weather and climate losses since 1980 and had recorded 403 confirmed disaster events exceeding $1 billion each through 2024. The agency will not update it beyond 2024.

Insurers, emergency managers, members of Congress, and academic researchers all relied on this dataset as the federal standard for measuring how much extreme weather costs the country each year. Stopping updates means losing a consistent way to track whether disaster costs are rising or falling year after year.

Separately, the National Weather Service cut back weather balloon launches at eight northern locations following staff reductions tied to wider workforce cuts, according to the Associated Press. Those balloons carry instruments that measure atmospheric conditions and feed data into computer models that forecasters use. Fewer launches in northern regions means the models start with less complete information, which can weaken the forecasts that state emergency managers, pilots, and farmers depend on.

What Climate.us Can Replace — and What It Cannot

The former NOAA staffers behind Climate.us are not a federal agency. They cannot order weather balloons launched, control budgets, or update disaster data. What they can do is take existing information and explain it to the public in clear language — the kind of science communication that Climate.gov specialized in.

That matters, but it has limits. Climate.gov carried the authority of a federal agency and a .gov web address. Climate.us will operate as a nonprofit or independent entity and has to build trust from scratch. For researchers who used Climate.gov's datasets and tools, the loss goes deeper: not every piece of that site can simply be copied by a private organization, no matter how expert its staff.

The National Security Archive's research underscores why this asymmetry matters. Once public access to federal data disappears — even briefly — gaps open up in the official record that are hard to fill later. Private websites can save snapshots of information; they cannot recreate the ongoing cycle of updates that made federal datasets the authoritative version.

The federal climate information system works in layers: raw measurements from weather stations and satellites, processed datasets, final products like the Billion Dollar tracker, and public-facing explanations. The current cuts touch all four layers. Climate.us can address the public communication layer. But the measurement and data layers — weather balloons, satellite readings, long-term data archives — remain only federal agencies' responsibility, and there is no private substitute.

For people who use this information daily, the urgent question is which products and datasets have credible alternatives and which do not. Weather balloon data feeds real-time forecasts; no volunteer network can replace that. The Billion Dollar dataset has some analogs in academic and insurance-sector databases, though none have the same consistency or historical depth. Climate.gov's public science content is closest to what Climate.us can genuinely reconstruct.

Whether the former NOAA staff can build the same reach — the citations, the routine reliance by other organizations, the distribution across newsrooms and government offices — is an open question that the launch alone cannot answer.