A group of former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees has launched Climate.us, a new website that restores climate information removed from government servers last year when the Trump administration shuttered the popular Climate.gov site.
The site went live this week, filling a void left by the government-run website that had been a trusted source for climate data, according to Rebecca Lindsey, a former program director for Climate.gov who now heads the Climate.us project. Lindsey said the site receives nearly 1 million visitors a month, based on 2021 numbers.
Lindsey and two other former NOAA employees who helped run the government site began re-creating it in August 2025, after they were laid off as part of the Department of Government Efficiency cutbacks. Most of the underlying data remains technically accessible on government servers, Lindsey said, but is difficult to find.
“This information is too important. It should remain in a protected place,” Lindsey told NPR.
A visitor to the former NOAA climate site is now greeted with a page stating: “In compliance with Executive Order 14303 … Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.”
Lindsey described the result as if NOAA “renovated a store, and they had the front door open into a closet.”
The team crowdsourced about $280,000 to get the technical work started and recruited volunteers, including about 80 scientists to serve on the group’s science panel and to fact-check content. This year, the effort also received a one-time grant from an anonymous donor that Lindsey said will keep the project afloat until at least February 2027.
Because NOAA’s climate data is public, downloading and recreating the content was relatively straightforward, Lindsey said. However, replacing the old site’s search capability proved more challenging.
“The technical issues were more challenging than the content issues,” she said.
Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, said she frequently referred people to Climate.gov because of its accuracy and easy-to-understand information. The site’s disappearance, she said, made it harder for the public to access trustworthy climate change information.
“They’re really helping people connect what’s happening at the global scale to how it matters to their lives,” Hayhoe said of the new site.
Gretchen Gehrke, a science communicator at the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, a nonprofit that works to make environmental information publicly available, called Climate.gov a “flagship” source that was “hugely important” for providing context and analysis.
“I think what it did was take this huge amount of climate data that we have and make it much, much more accessible for the public and for policymakers,” Gehrke said.
Gehrke noted that the exodus of expertise from government has created new opportunities. “Now we have a lot of expertise outside of the government because of so much brain drain from the government, and we can really stand up things. We can have powerful interventions, and [Climate.us], I think, is a success story of that.”
Gehrke also expressed concern about what she called the “quiet discontinuation” of climate data under the Trump administration, which she said could leave scientists without the information they need to address climate change.
Lindsey said the editorial philosophy of Climate.us will remain the same as Climate.gov’s — “just the facts.”
“Climate.gov was never about — and Climate.us will never be about — telling Americans what to do about climate change,” she said. “The site will continue to be nonpartisan but will be focusing on the science and explaining science and showing people what the data show.”