Why Germany Is Building an Ark for U.S. Climate Data

German researchers and institutions are building overseas backups of U.S. climate data to protect critical climate simulations and observational records from political meddling, technical failure, cyberattack, or wartime damage. The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is adding about 5 petabytes of storage to its vaults to host copies of U.S. model outputs for the seventh IPCC assessment (CMIP7-ark), part of a broader German Research Foundation program funded at roughly $35 million. Other projects with names like SHIELD and SEND have been funded to duplicate endangered U.S. datasets after a run of actions - budget cuts, removal of online content, attempts to curtail satellites and even efforts to close long-running observatories - eroded trust that American repositories will preserve public-domain data long term.

The effort responds to concrete losses and risks: federally supported SEDAC datasets were recently wiped and had to be scraped and rehosted, Mauna Loa was briefly threatened with closure, institutions face ransom-driven hacks, and Ukraine’s science collections suffered damage and required offsite digitization. Transferring petabytes is costly and slow - often requiring physical transport - so the community is now pursuing decentralized, resilient storage and new governance. Professional societies such as the AGU have launched Data Resilience initiatives and a U.S. Academic Alliance for IPCC authorship to keep science accessible and to reimagine how global climate data are organized and preserved.