Airplane Turbulence May Worsen Thanks to Trump

Plane rides are about to get bumpier.

Pilots depend on live weather data to safely navigate the skies. Yet the Trump administration is threatening to dismantle the place that produces it: the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). That’s because the administration doesn’t like what the center’s data shows: that climate change is worsening extreme weather.

Silencing climate scientists and their research won’t make the impacts of climate change less deadly. Trump’s move endangers everyone – which is why Earthjustice and our partners are fighting back.

Scientists for the NCAR get their workstations ready before takeoff in a research aircraft. (RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post via Getty Images)

“The mothership” of atmospheric science

If you’ve ever landed safely after flying through a storm, NCAR made that possible.

For decades, scientists at NCAR have developed some of the world’s most advanced technology for visualizing weather patterns. This allows pilots to navigate safely away from unstable pockets of air that would jeopardize passengers. Even in areas with low visibility or little-mapped stretches of ocean, pilots can still see where they’re going using NCAR’s modeling. Their research is the backbone of modern aviation navigation.

Dismantling NCAR would go beyond endangering millions of people on commercial flights. Military flight operations would be weakened. Farmers and businesses would lose critical data they rely on to prevent agricultural losses in an era of record-breaking weather. Federal agencies, states, and municipal services all depend on NCAR’s advanced hurricane forecasting to prepare their emergency responses.

The Trump administration argues that NCAR’s research could simply be redistributed to other agencies. But NCAR is intentionally designed to be an integrated data hub. It connects atmospheric research from multiple labs into one place, with advanced supercomputers. Scientists have described it as “the mothership” of atmospheric sciences.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research facility in Boulder, Colorado. (Brennan Linsley / AP)

Attacking climate research

In December 2025, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the federal agency that funds NCAR, announced it was looking for ways to break up and redistribute the center. Documents obtained in a lawsuit later revealed that the move had nothing to do with efficiency: the agency’s specific goal was to eliminate research focused on climate change.

President Trump has long characterized climate change and any efforts to address it as a hoax. His administration has attacked climate protections, funding, and research. But the public isn’t fooled by Trump’s attempts to gaslight us. We can see the impacts of climate change with our own eyes.  Americans across the country are experiencing increasingly extreme heat, storms, fires, and floods. Undermining the government’s ability to track climate impacts will only worsen harm to our health, communities, and economy.

That’s why Earthjustice and our partners are using the power of the law to defend climate science from these baseless attacks.

In September, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists demanding that the administration turn over documents related to its shadowy plans to dismantle NCAR.

“Losing NCAR would set back scientific research, with real consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods,” says Dr. Carlos Martinez, Senior Climate Scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “As a taxpayer-funded public good, NCAR belongs to all of us, and we deserve to know the rationale and deliberations behind any effort to dismantle or restructure it.”

This lawsuit is one of several we have filed to fight the administration’s attacks on climate, including its unlawful repeal of the endangerment finding — the government’s declaration that greenhouse gases threaten public health — and attempt to purge government websites of critical climate-related information.