NOAA pulled the plug on its 20-year Arctic climate record — and Alaska's scientists are scrambling to save it

For two decades, the federal government has published an annual account of how fast the top of the world is warming — much of it written by Alaskans, much of it about Alaska. This week the government walked away from it, and the scientists behind the report are now trying to keep it alive on their own.

NOAA notified the editors of the Arctic Report Card on Aug. 10 that it was ending all support, effective immediately and with no reason given. "We were informed in a phone call with NOAA yesterday that effective immediately NOAA was ending all support for the Arctic Report Card," lead editor Rick Thoman, a University of Alaska Fairbanks climate specialist, told The Hill. Production of the 2026 edition, due out in December, was already well underway.

The Arctic Report Card is the authoritative yearly synthesis of a region warming faster than anywhere on Earth. Since 2006 it has drawn together peer-reviewed essays from researchers tracking Arctic temperature, sea ice, snow cover, ocean conditions and wildlife. The 2025 edition documented the warmest Arctic water year on record, 1.60 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average and the warmest since 1900; earlier editions carried a starker finding still, that the Arctic had for the first time become a net contributor to climate change as its permafrost thaws.

Much of that record is Alaska's own. UAF is a leading contributor, and in last year's edition about two-thirds of the chapters had Alaska lead or contributing authors. Past reports have chronicled distinctly Alaskan change — the collapse of Chinook runs on the Yukon, greening tundra, the shifting fortunes of western Alaska salmon in a warming ocean.

Thoman was blunt about the loss and firm that the report was never political. "The Arctic Report Card has been focused on reporting observations in the Arctic, not modeling, not projections, not policy," he said. "This isn't a political thing." In his newsletter days later, he wrote: "I am devastated by this development, having worked for NOAA for 30 years."

The withdrawal fits a broader pattern at the agency under the Trump administration. By CNN's accounting, NOAA has stopped producing its annual report on billion-dollar weather disasters, dismissed all the authors of the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment in favor of a new set that has questioned accepted climate findings, and halted updates to its public climate.gov site. NOAA confirmed the report-card change without saying why. "Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA," spokesperson Kim Doster said, adding that the underlying data NOAA collects "will continue to be collected and will remain publicly available."

That distinction — the data survives, the report may not — is the gap the scientists are trying to close. Losing NOAA means losing the coordinating editors, peer review, web presence, graphics and publicity the agency provided, even as the observations keep coming in. The team is now working on what Thoman called a "sans NOAA" version, an independent effort of the kind foundations and nonprofits have coordinated after other federal science reports were canceled. "Just today it's looking more likely we'll be able to produce a timely, peer-reviewed Arctic Report Card 2026," he wrote, adding that he is optimistic about continuing beyond this year, though how to do it without the agency is still being worked out.

For now, NOAA's Arctic Report Card page still presents the 2025 edition, makes no mention of a 2026 edition or any change in support, and the agency has issued no news release.