The first scientific paper has been added to the "US Climate Collection," a new initiative designed to fill the gap left by the termination of the next US National Climate Assessment. The paper, authored by 149 researchers, is being published simultaneously in journals operated by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS).
This effort follows actions taken by the Trump administration last year to dismantle the work on the upcoming climate report. The administration eliminated funding for the US Global Change Research Program and removed hundreds of contributing authors from the project. Additionally, past reports were taken offline, prompting third parties to host copies to ensure the information remained accessible, despite the reports being legally required.
In response, the AGU and AMS announced a centralized resource to allow researchers to compile work that would have otherwise fed into the national report, as well as potential regional and local assessments. The "US Climate Collection" operates differently from the US Global Change Research Program or the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Instead of facilitating the creation of a single, coordinated massive report, the initiative invites teams of researchers to publish peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, which are then aggregated into a central repository for future use.
The inaugural paper in the collection serves as a roadmap intended to prioritize future contributions to the database. Many of the 149 authors involved in this specific paper had previously been working on the US National Climate Assessment before the program was disrupted.
By shifting the focus to individual peer-reviewed publications, the AGU and AMS aim to maintain a structured scientific record of US climate data and analysis. This approach ensures that critical research remains accessible to policymakers and the public, even in the absence of the official government-led assessment process.
<small>Source: Ars Technica — read the original story there.</small>
