Locked doors this month at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.Matt Roth for The New York Times
If you want official numbers on how 2018 ranks in the annals of recent record-breaking temperatures, you’ll have to wait.
One result of the government shutdown, now in its fourth week, is that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to issue their annual temperature analysis. And, because that data is so widely used, neither can some other governments.
For example, Britain’s national weather and climate monitoring service, the Met Office, publishes its own global temperature estimates that incorporate NOAA data but use a slightly different analytical method. That’s important because when many different analyses show the same trend — in this case, rising global temperatures — it helps give researchers confidence that their work is sound. But, the NOAA data that the Met Office needs is currently offline.
“Usually, we would have received it by now,” said John Kennedy, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, which specializes in climate research. “But this month, we haven’t.”
The global temperature numbers aren’t the only climate and environmental data we would have reported by now if not for the government shutdown.
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NOAA has issued the disaster-cost estimate since 1980, but that information is not yet available for last year, which saw Hurricanes Michael and Florence, and a wildfire season that some call the deadliest and most destructive in California’s history.
Researchers say those data delays are mostly just a nuisance. It’s unlikely, for example, that when the temperature data is issued it will differ significantly from preliminary estimates that placed 2018 as the fourth-warmest year on record (The Japan Meteorological agency has issued its preliminary estimates saying as much).
They call the interruption of key scientific research, though, a much bigger problem that will have longer lasting repercussions.
