How organizations are adapting to less certain climate and weather data

There’s been no shortage of federal departments, agencies, and other initiatives the Trump administration has targeted for cuts in the president’s first year back in the White House (which is also the target of some major demolition work).

Not even “technocratic” agencies charged with gathering vital data have escaped Trump’s radar. His firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, for instance, has some worried about future jobs reports. Trump is also targeting climate and weather departments, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Weather Service (NWS).

Organizations that rely on this data in their operations or to make key business decisions told CFO Brew they’re turning to alternative data sources and investing more resources in gathering and backing up data.

“We’re just going to have to find more creative ways of trying to get the right data to validate our models,” Kamil Kluza, co-founder and COO of Climate X, which provides global climate data risk data to companies like banks and asset managers, told us.

Working out alternatives is “not ideal, because that means extra development and R&D time on our end,” but it probably won’t change the end product for customers, Kluza said. He added that the federal program cuts should only impact forecasting accuracy in the short term.

Others outside of government, including nonprofits and philanthropies, are also working to preserve data reporting they feel is “crucial to continue,” Anjuli Bamzai, past president of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), told CFO Brew

NOAA’s ark is closed (and isn’t saying how expensive the flood was). So, what exactly is going on at NOAA? The weather and climate science agency has shed thousands of employees and halted some of its data programs. The Trump administration dismissed roughly 20% of its workforce earlier this year, according to the New York Times. The administration later allowed the NWS to hire back around 450 people for roles including meteorologists and radar technicians, Reuters reported.

NOAA also discontinued a number of data products this year, including its billion-dollar weather and climate disasters database that tracked the cost estimates of various natural catastrophes. The nonprofit research group Climate Central now maintains the database, and recently announced that 14 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters resulted in $101.4 billion in damages in the first six months of 2025.

Ellen Mecray, Climate Central’s managing director of climate services, said “a fascinating mix of people” rely on the disasters database. Insurance companies use the data to understand the cost of certain weather risks, while commercial real estate companies may look at a region’s weather risk profile when deciding whether to do business there.

“It really sets the context…for the changes that everyone is experiencing,” she told us. “It’s being able to take the hazards that we’re measuring and observing, and translating them into a measure of risk based on dollar amount.”

The private sector has lobbied in favor of keeping NOAA intact. In June, the Reinsurance Association of America (RAA), a trade group representing reinsurance companies, called on Congress to fully fund the agency.

“Perhaps no other federal entity facilitates greater economic and commercial activity than NOAA and its data sources,” Frank Nutter, president of RAA, said in a statement.

Bridging the gap. The NOAA cuts are taking place at a time when natural disasters are becoming more frequent and severe. Experts say that climate change is a major culprit behind this.

Severe events such as a 100-year flood, which theoretically has just a 1% chance of happening any year, are now “certainly more routine,” Chris Goode, co-founder and CEO of forecasting data company Climavision, told us.

The business impact of severe weather is clear. For example, delivery companies can’t operate in flooded areas, which is “a huge economic impact for [the] business, not to mention a customer satisfaction problem as well,” Goode explained.

Heightened risk from climate change means companies can’t afford to view severe weather events “as background noise anymore,” Goode said. Some organizations are addressing this risk by “taking a more active role in trying to contribute to the accuracy of the forecast,” he said.

Houston-based utility company CenterPoint Energy has so far still been able to access all the weather and climate data it needs, according to Matt Lanza, the company’s manager of meteorology. Even so, CenterPoint is looking for backup sources for vital data, using a third-party forecasting service, and even installing weather stations of its own, Lanza said. CenterPoint, in fact, shares the data from its weather stations with the NWS.

“It’s impossible to replace everything that the federal government does for weather and climate, but it’s little things like this that I think help,” Lanza told us.

The bigger issue. Still, experts worry about some data that no one else but the government is currently equipped to gather. Bamzai is worried about the future of the global ocean monitoring program called Argo, which she said relied heavily on US support. And the National Snow and Ice Data Center has stopped maintaining certain datasets, including one that monitors Arctic and Antarctic sea ice concentration, Mecray noted.

These “foundational” datasets represent “something that the government has made such a deep investment in, and we’re so reliant on them, that there’s really no way that they can be [taken] from somewhere else,” Mecray said.

Trump’s reversal of government climate data monitoring and collection is just one facet of a broader pushback on environmental and sustainability initiatives. The SEC effectively killed its climate reporting rule, while the EU has scaled back its own reporting requirements.

Regardless of what’s happening at government agencies, businesses still recognize the importance of understanding climate change risk, according to Climate X’s Kluza.

“I think banks and asset managers are very savvy in that they understand the systemic risk that they need to capture, and they treat it very much like” other risks, he said. “This is just part of their enterprise risk management.”