An employee looks at multiple hurricane models displayed on monitors at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center in Miami on May 30, 2025.
Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
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Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
Scientists, educators, farmers and the broader public now have a new website for climate information in the United States. The site, Climate.us, launched this week and fills a void left when a government-run climate information website was shut down last year by the Trump administration.
The new site was created by former employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the government’s lead scientific agency for climate, weather and ocean monitoring — who worked on Climate.gov until they were laid off last year as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cutbacks.
Climate.gov had long been a trusted source for official government climate data. Nearly 1 million visitors came to the site each month, according to 2021 numbers.
Most of the data remains technically accessible on government servers, but it is difficult to find, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former program director for Climate.gov who now heads the Climate.us project. In August 2025, she and two other former NOAA employees who helped run the government site began to re-create it.
“This information is too important. It should remain in a protected place,” Lindsey says.
As of June 24, 2025, users going to the NOAA climate site are presented with a page saying: “In compliance with Executive Order 14303 … Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.” When NPR asked for comment, NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster emailed the same statement.
A front door opening into a closet
The result, Lindsey says, is NOAA “renovated a store, and they had the front door open into a closet.”
Lindsey and her small team crowdsourced about $280,000 to get started on the technical part of the new climate site. They also recruited volunteers, including about 80 scientists to serve on the group’s science panel and to be subject-matter experts to fact-check what the site publishes. This year, the effort also received a one-time grant from an anonymous donor that Lindsey says will keep the project afloat until at least February 2027.
NOAA’s climate data is public, making the downloading and the creation of the new Climate.us site relatively straightforward, Lindsey says. But there were still obstacles — among them, creating a new search capability to replace one on the old government site that would have been too expensive to keep using.
“The technical issues were more challenging than the content issues,” she says.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, says she frequently referred people to Climate.gov because of its accuracy and easy-to-understand information. The site’s disappearance, she says, made it harder for the public and other users of NOAA data to access trustworthy climate change information. Climate.us goes a long way to closing that gap.
“They’re really helping people connect what’s happening at the global scale to how it matters to their lives,” she says.
“One of the things that researchers have identified is public education and understanding of not just what’s happening, but why it matters and how it affects us,” Hayhoe says.
Climate.gov was considered a “flagship” source and “hugely important” not only for raw data, but for context and analysis, says Gretchen Gehrke, a science communicator at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI), a nonprofit group that works to make information about the environment available to the public.
“I think what it did was take this huge amount of climate data that we have and make it much, much more accessible for the public and for policymakers,” she says.
Gehrke says that since DOGE, “now we have a lot of expertise outside of the government because of so much brain drain from the government, and we can really stand up things. We can have powerful interventions, and [Climate.us], I think, is a success story of that.”
Keeping the original Climate.gov philosophy
The new site re-creates the old “climate dashboard” on the government site that contained more than a dozen key graphs related to climate change. It also features Climate.gov’s 15-year collection of climate news and stories, expert blogs, visual status reports on key climate indicators, maps and data pathways, climate literacy resources and classroom materials, according to the site.
Lindsey says the editorial philosophy of Climate.us will remain the same as it was in Climate.gov’s heyday — just the facts.
“Climate.gov was never about — and Climate.us will never be about — telling Americans what to do about climate change,” she says. “The site will continue to be nonpartisan but will be focusing on the science and explaining science and showing people what the data show.”
Just last week, the White House was forced to backtrack on a plan to remove a half-dozen high-tech data-collection buoys from the Pacific. The buoys measure sea-surface temperature, currents and changes in ocean chemistry due to carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.
EDGI’s Gehrke is concerned about the “quiet discontinuation” of climate data under the Trump administration, which could leave scientists without the information they need to address climate change. She thinks Climate.us could prove a valuable tool for keeping tabs on that.
“We are still not in a position to know what data is even being collected,” she says.
Lindsey says there is discussion within Climate.us about whether the site’s role will be to safeguard climate information until it can return to government stewardship in a future administration, or whether it should remain an independent resource. She sees the value in keeping it out of politicians’ hands.
“The fact that they got rid of it so easily is proof that we shouldn’t make it vulnerable again,” she says.
