German research center builds a data 'ark' to protect U.S. climate science
Hamburg's climate computing center will store backups of U.S. simulations for the next UN climate assessment amid fears of political interference.
Germany's national climate computing center is adding storage to hold backup copies of U.S. climate simulations, aiming to protect work for the next United Nations (UN) climate assessment from possible interference by the Trump administration.
The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) in Hamburg, which already stores 254 petabytes of climate data, is installing about 5 more petabytes of capacity. The project, called “CMIP7-ark,” will safeguard the U.S. contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment due in 2029.
The work is funded through a $35 million program the German Research Foundation set up in late 2025 to store copies of U.S. public data. The foundation cited the administration's cuts to climate research and removal of climate references from government websites. “The deletion of data has also become a possibility,” said Kathrin Winkler, a program manager at the foundation.
The United States withdrew from the IPCC and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, though U.S. researchers still contribute to global climate science. In 2025, datasets from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center were removed and had to be rescued by other institutions.
“We cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost for technical or political reasons,” said Christopher Kadow, head of data analysis at the DKRZ.
This brief is based on reporting by Christian Schwägerl for Yale Environment 360, republished Sept. 25, 2026, by Inside Climate News. Read the original: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25092026/germany-computing-center-hosts-us-climate-data/
This article was produced with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by an editor before publication.
