NCAR is not only one of the leaders in climate science, but is an exceptionally important institution for space weather and upper atmosphere modeling. This will be an enormous loss for the scientific community. As someone in the atmospheric and space science community, this decision will have devastating consequences for decades to come.

Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, according to a senior White House official, taking aim at one of the world's leading climate research labs.

Trump officials have circled the federally funded research institution, based in Boulder, Colorado, as a hub for "federal climate alarmism" after it was established decades earlier in 1960 for research in atmospheric chemistry and physical meteorology.

The administration plans to identify and eliminate what it calls "green new scam research activities" during an upcoming review of the center, according to the White House, while "vital functions" such as weather modeling and supercomputing will be moved to another entity or location. The White House billed the restructuring as a return to the NCAR's original focus.