On the final day for public feedback on the potential breakup of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of Colorado Boulder submitted a proposal to run the lab itself, alongside two partner universities.
“NCAR’s impact is amplified by its location within the Boulder research ecosystem,” CU Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz and Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation Massimo Ruzzene wrote in the letter, arguing that breaking up or relocating the lab would fracture one of the most concentrated hubs of atmospheric science in the world.
NCAR is funded by the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, and run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, or UCAR, a Boulder-based nonprofit consortium of 129 universities.
In January, the Trump administration opened a call for proposals to “restructure” the lab. The public comment period closed last week. UCAR has sued over the effort, arguing that dismantling NCAR is an act of retaliation meant to punish Colorado for not releasing Tina Peters, a local election official convicted of felonies related to 2020 election conspiracy theories.
Read: UCAR sues Trump administration over plan to dismantle Boulder’s NCAR
In its letter, CU Boulder urged the National Science Foundation not to fragment NCAR or transfer it to a for-profit or mission-driven entity. But if restructuring moves forward, the university proposed a smaller, university-led consortium anchored by CU Boulder, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wyoming that would run the lab’s core functions.
This structure would appear to replace UCAR, the consortium that currently manages NCAR.
The proposal centers on maintaining NCAR’s “integrated” structure, which combines observations, modeling, theory and advanced computing in a single institution and allows coordination among universities and federal labs nationwide.
Dividing those functions across institutions would be “financially costly” and “inefficient,” the letter states, warning that fragmentation would disrupt scientific collaboration and weaken national forecasting capabilities.
Under CU Boulder’s plan, NCAR would remain the backbone of the nation’s atmospheric and Earth science system, while partner universities would contribute their own strengths. These include severe weather research and radar technology in Oklahoma, high-performance computing in Wyoming, and climate, space weather and wildfire research in Boulder. The universities would help expand research capacity and workforce development while maintaining open access to NCAR’s tools and resources for scientists nationwide, according to the letter.
The letter highlights Boulder’s dense research ecosystem as a key reason to keep the lab in the city. NCAR sits within a cluster of federal labs, including NOAA and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, as well as CU’s research institutes. The institutions form what the letter describes as a “multiplier effect” for scientific discovery, training and technology development. Disrupting that network, it argues, would weaken long-standing collaborations and reduce the return on federal investment.
The proposed consortium builds on existing relationships. CU Boulder faculty collaborate with NCAR scientists on space weather and atmospheric modeling. The University of Oklahoma has partnered with NCAR on AI research institutes established in 2020, while Wyoming has invested millions in the NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center, where university researchers receive a share of the computing resources.
Both the University of Oklahoma and the University of Wyoming have separately submitted proposals to take on some of NCAR’s assets. According to UCAR’s lawsuit, NSF has already taken steps to transfer operations of the NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center to the University of Wyoming.
It is unclear whether proposals from Wyoming and Oklahoma also included plans for a consortium. CU “worked with them prior to submitting the letter,” according to CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Cousins.
A UCAR spokesperson said CU Boulder did not reach out to the consortium before submitting its proposal, but declined to comment further.
UCAR has argued that the lab’s integrated structure is essential to its success. The organization, governed by an 18-member board of trustees, said in its own response to NSF that NCAR “yields far higher returns than would be possible through individual research initiatives.”
“If the core components of NSF NCAR were to be broken apart, the essential value of this national investment would be severely diminished, as the current synergies would be destroyed,” the board wrote.
Like UCAR, CU’s proposal argues NCAR should remain intact but appears to differ on governance. Schwartz and Ruzzene wrote that these three universities could “comprise a starting point” for a smaller consortium that could later expand to include other leading research universities.