The NSF’s Role in Climate Science
Authors: Bamzai Anjuli S. 
Published: February 2020

In the years following the Second World War, the U.S. government played a prominent role in the support of basic scientific research. The National Science Foundation (NSF) was created in 1950 with the primary mission of supporting fundamental science and engineering, excluding medical sciences. Over the years, the NSF has operated from the “bottom up,” keeping close track of research around the United States and the world while maintaining constant contact with the research community to identify ever-moving horizons of inquiry.

In the 1950s the field of meteorology was something of a poor cousin to the other branches of science; forecasting was considered more of trade than a discipline founded on sound theoretical foundations. Realizing the importance of the field to both the economy and national security, the NSF leadership made a concerted effort to enhance understanding of the global atmospheric circulation. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was established to complement ongoing research efforts in academic institutions; it has played a pivotal role in providing observational and modeling tools to the emerging cadre of researchers in the disciplines of meteorology and atmospheric sciences. As understanding of the predictability of the coupled atmosphere-ocean system grew, the field of climate science emerged as a natural outgrowth of meteorology, oceanography, and atmospheric sciences.

The NSF played a leading role in the implementation of major international programs such as the International Geophysical Year (IGY), the Global Weather Experiment, the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere (TOGA). Through these programs, understanding of the coupled climate system comprising atmosphere, ocean, land, ice-sheet, and sea ice greatly improved. Consistent with its mission, the NSF supported projects that advanced fundamental knowledge of forcing and feedbacks in the coupled atmosphere-ocean-land system. Research projects have included theoretical, observational, and modeling studies of the following: the general circulation of the stratosphere and troposphere; the processes that govern climate; the causes of climate variability and change; methods of predicting climate variations; climate predictability; development and testing of parameterization of physical processes; numerical methods for use in large-scale climate models; the assembly and analysis of instrumental and/or modeled climate data; data assimilation studies; and the development and use of climate models to diagnose and simulate climate variability and change.

Climate scientists work together on an array of topics spanning time scales from the seasonal to the centennial. The NSF also supports research on the natural evolution of the earth’s climate on geological time scales with the goal of providing a baseline for present variability and future trends. The development of paleoclimate data sets has resulted in longer term data for evaluation of model simulations, analogous to the evaluation using instrumental observations. This has enabled scientists to create transformative syntheses of paleoclimate data and modeling outcomes in order to understand the response of the longer-term and higher magnitude variability of the climate system that is observed in the geological records.

The NSF will continue to address emerging issues in climate and earth-system science through balanced investments in transformative ideas, enabling infrastructure and major facilities to be developed.