Former NOAA Staff Launch Independent Climate Website After Trump Administration Purge

So here's a story that matters whether you're a farmer checking drought forecasts, a teacher explaining climate change, or just someone trying to make sense of the extreme weather hitting your area.

A group of former government scientists just launched a brand-new, independent climate information website called Climate.us — and they built it because the one you used to rely on got quietly shut down by the Trump administration.

Here's the backstory. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, better known as NOAA, used to run a site called Climate.gov. It was the go-to hub for plain-English climate data — the kind of resource that scientists, educators, farmers, insurance analysts, and curious everyday people all bookmarked. At its peak, it was pulling nearly 1 million visitors a month. Then, when the Trump administration came back into office, DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency — basically a cost-cutting operation) laid off almost all the staff behind the site and effectively shut it down. The web address now redirects you to a bland NOAA page that, according to the people who built the original, feels like walking into a store where someone boarded up all the shelves.

Enter Rebecca Lindsey. She was a program director at Climate.gov before getting laid off, and she wasn't about to let years of climate knowledge just vanish. Back in August 2025, she and two other former NOAA colleagues started rebuilding it from scratch. The result — Climate.us — just went fully live this week.

Here's what they actually pulled off: the team crowdsourced about $280,000 to cover the technical costs, recruited around 80 volunteer scientists to fact-check everything the site publishes, and secured a one-time grant from an anonymous donor that keeps them afloat until at least February 2027. The site now houses some 15 years of raw climate and weather data, illustrated explainers, and access to government-mandated climate assessments — all the stuff that used to live on Climate.gov.

The technical side wasn't easy, either. The original site used a search tool that would've been too expensive to license independently, so they had to build a new one. 'The technical issues were more challenging than the content issues,' Lindsey said.

Why does this matter to you personally? If you've ever Googled 'is this summer hotter than normal' or 'what's happening with hurricanes,' you've probably landed on a site that referenced NOAA data. With the government version buried and hard to navigate, Climate.us steps in as the public-facing version of that information — free, searchable, and not subject to a political administration's decisions about what stays up and what disappears.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech, put it plainly: the old site's disappearance made it harder for regular people to access trustworthy climate information, and Climate.us goes a long way toward closing that gap.

One big open question: the team hasn't decided yet whether Climate.us is a temporary bridge — something to hold down the fort until a future administration restores Climate.gov — or whether it should become a permanent, independent institution. Lindsey's lean? Keep it out of politicians' hands for good. 'The fact that they got rid of it so easily is proof that we shouldn't make it vulnerable again,' she said.

For now, the site is live, it's free, and it's run by the same people who built the original. That's worth bookmarking.