Why the National Science Foundation Matters

The Trump administration has been aggressively attacking America's science organizations and institutions since Inauguration Day, including the National Science Foundation, commonly referred to by scientists as "NSF."  They placed a freeze on funding actions for a while (since unfrozen at least temporarily by the courts), have program managers reviewing grants for keywords that suggest violation of possible executive orders, and now are threatening to layoff 25 to 50% of the NSF staff.  

The importance of the NSF for US science, workforce development, and economic growth is enormous, but not always obvious.  When the military proposes to close a base, there's often a major uproar about how that will hurt the local economy.  If the NSF were severely restricted, there would be layoffs at universities across the country, including graduate students, post-docs, and staff.  There would also be long-term ripple effects on American innovation, national security, and economic development. Based on NSF funding, next-generation scientists are developed and companies launched. 

Rather than cite numbers, I want to tell a story of the importance of the NSF for my students and I and how this has provided tangible benefits for our nation.  In 1988 I walked into my undergraduate advisor's office at Penn State to discuss what classes I should take to finish my bachelor's degree in meteorology.  He asked me what I was going to do when I graduated and I said I had no idea.  He looked over my grades and said that I should go to graduate school.  I had never considered this before.  My father was a huge supporter of my education, but he went to community college and then night school for 7 years to earn his bachelors degree.  I figured a bachelors degree was enough and graduate school would be expensive.  I said this to my advisor and he said to me that I could get paid to go to graduate school.  That meeting changed my life.

I ended up going to graduate school with support for my graduate research assistantship coming from National Science Foundation grants.  I would not have earned a Ph.D. without that support and I never would have had the opportunity to collaborate with scientists from across the country and around the world.  

In graduate school I began to work with an atmospheric modeling system called the MM5.  Many people smarter than me at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (supported by NSF) and Penn State (supported by NSF and other agencies) developed the MM5, but there weren't that many people using it because it took a lot of compute horsepower and thus was run primarily on expensive supercomputers.  However, desktop computing was getting cheaper, so we began to work to run the MM5 in "real time" on relatively cheap desktop computers.  We also formed an online user group, something that you would take for granted today, but was new at the time.  We also began to run real-time forecasts and post the results on the internet with access through a browser called Mosaic, one of the first web browsers which was released in 1993.  Eventually the MM5 was replaced by the WRF and over time this community grew to literally thousands of scientists, all sharing ideas, code, etc.  The WRF model today is widely used not just for research, but also by insurance companies, energy companies, forecasting companies, etc.  You see forecasts produced by the WRF on TV and don't even know it.  It is also used by the Air Force for battlefield forecasting.  It takes a village to do science like this and that village was supported by NSF.  One of my fellow graduate students formed one of the first renewable energy forecasting companies and used the WRF in their forecast systems.  

Eventually I joined the faculty at the University of Utah.  I have had continuous funding from the NSF through a total of 12 grants over the past 30 years.  Some of these grants have been research focused, others education focused.  With NSF support, we have brought mobile radars to Utah to give students hands on instruction in how to operate and use a scanning radar.  If you don't think this is important, just wait a few years because the radar revolution is coming.  Costs are dropping and private industry is now installing gap filling radars across the country.  Utah has some big radar gaps.  Those will be filled in the coming years to help with road weather forecasting and estimating snowpack accumulation for water resource management.  Oh yeah, and flash flood and other severe weather forecasts will get better. 

Many of my graduate students have been supported in full or in part by NSF funding.  Sure they did some good science along the way, but look what they are doing today for our Nation's economy and security. Weather affects 1/3 of the US economy.  I have former students working for companies like Amazon Prime Air, Vaisala, Spire, and Maxar.  Others are in the insurance industry (you think they care about hurricanes and wildfires?).  Others have started their own businesses.  I've had several Air Force officers who have earned their M.S. or Ph.Ds in my group, often working on projects that are supported by NSF.  As Sun Tzu wrote, "'Know the enemy, know yourself; your victory will never be endangered. Know the ground, know the weather; your victory will then be total."  These former students are building the new economy and protecting our nation.  

Support for NSF and the remarkable people that work at it is not an expense.  It is an investment.  An investment that fosters innovation, economic growth, and national security.  Burn it down at the country's peril. 

Any opinions or views expressed in this article and on this web site are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Utah or National Science Foundation.  They were prepared on a Tuesday night, during non-work hours, on my personal computer.

This article was updated to indicate that the National Center for Atmospheric Research contributed to the development of the MM5, not the National Science Foundation as mistyped (although the National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research).