Europe rescues research data from the US as NOAA loses its grip on it

Scientific data has turned out to be as political as submarine cables. The portal t3n.de describes how European institutions are trying to "rescue what they can" from collections that until now were safe only because they sat on servers in the United States.

NOAA, the American agency for oceans and the atmosphere, is one example. It has more than 10,000 employees, 17 ships, 3 weather satellites and several dozen laboratories and research centers. Its earliest predecessor is almost as old as the United States itself. Few institutions have gathered such complete series of data on weather, climate, the atmosphere and the oceans. At the start of 2025, about one tenth of the staff was laid off. As t3n writes, citing researchers, the cuts hit the agency's scientific core.

The consequences reach far beyond the US. "We need long-term data to know whether a heat wave was caused by a quirk of the weather or by climate change. And NOAA has a lot of that data," says Frank Oliver Glöckner, a professor of Earth system data science at the University of Bremen.

Where the trap came from

That such a large part of the collections sits in the US is no accident. "For decades we have had broad research cooperation with the United States. The data was often stored there because it was simplest, the hyperscalers were there. But the geopolitical dimension was not taken into account," explains Dennis-Kenji Kipker, research director and founder of the Cyberintelligence Institute in Frankfurt. This applies not only to climate but also to medicine and the social sciences.

For European institutions this now means recovery work: copying and rebuilding collections that formally remain the property of American agencies into European repositories. Sentiment is not the point here. Continuity of measurement is. An interrupted climate series cannot be filled in after the fact, because the measurements from the years when nobody took them are missing.

Distrust without a change in habits

Declarations about the need for sovereignty run up against habits. As t3n recalls in its guide to European data storage services, a study commissioned in 2025 by GMX and Web.de showed that 69 percent of German internet users have at least partial concerns about American cloud disks, and yet they use those services. This tension between declaration and practice is the backdrop to the whole debate about European infrastructure.

So this thread is worth watching calmly. Moving data to Europe does not solve the problem by itself; the infrastructure still has to be maintained, archiving financed and care taken that collections are genuinely accessible rather than merely deposited. But in the case of measurement data that cannot be generated again, it is the cheapest insurance available today.