Government Shutdown Affects Weather, Climate Programs
ClimateCentral.org, by Andrew Freedman, October 1, 2013
According to Commerce Department documents, 6,601 of the 12,001
employees of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- or
55 percent of the agency's workforce -- have been sent home without pay
due to the federal government shutdown. At NOAA's Climate Prediction
Center in Maryland, employees who provide operational climate forecasts
have stayed on the job, but those who monitor climate conditions have
been furloughed. In addition, much of the staff at NOAA's Earth Systems
Research Lab and the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, except for
positions related to maintaining computing resources, have also been
furloughed. Those two labs are heavily involved in NOAA's climate
research programs. Further, NASA, which receives the largest share of
climate science research funding under the U.S. Global Change Science
Program, did not have a functioning main website as of October 1, and
just 3 percent of its workforce (including the astronauts currently in
space on the International Space Station) are still on the job.
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