A Climate Supercomputer Is Getting New Bosses. It’s Not Clear Who.

The U.S. National Science Foundation said on Thursday that the management and operations of a supercomputer used by more than 4,000 climate and weather scientists would be transferred from the National Center for Atmospheric Research to a “third-party operator.” The machine is housed at an NCAR facility in Cheyenne, Wyo., and has been run by NCAR, which has 835 scientists and engineers headquartered in Boulder, Colo., since it opened in 2012.

The announcement took many scientists by surprise. Ramalingam Saravanan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said he was concerned that he would no longer be able to run computer models that predict weather and climate conditions around the globe down to a scale of one square kilometer.

“If you are able to use the computers just as before, we can do business as usual,” Dr. Saravanan said.

United States, Cheyenne, Wyoming

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