Disband the bulk of OAR climate-change research

Research notes

• OAR still exists and still does climate research: noaa.gov/research (loaded 2026-08-27) describes OAR as NOAA’s research line office, and the FY2026 enacted base the FY2027 request proposes to zero out is the proof that Congress kept it.
• Corrected 2026-09-03: the laboratory and cooperative-institute pages are not walls. research.noaa.gov/labs-programs/ and ci.noaa.gov both open to a plain browser User-Agent; the earlier 403 was measured with a bare curl. Read on 2026-09-03 they show the network intact — every OAR laboratory the office had before the window is listed as current, and ci.noaa.gov states “Currently, NOAA supports 16 Cooperative Institutes consisting of 80 universities, and research institutions across 33 states, the District of Columbia, US Territories, and Canada”, with none marked closed or winding down. Both pages are undated, so under playbook §5 they would be Evidence dated at the observation; they are left as leads because the appropriation Evidence already carries the rung and an undated page cannot date a non-event. See #1879, which owns the network half of this trail.
• One in-window OAR action on climate products, previously unrecorded. research.noaa.gov/notice-of-changes/ — the page OAR maintains to announce changes to its products, tools and services — carries an entry dated 2025-06-30: “In compliance with Executive Order 14303, Restoring Gold Standard Science, NOAA is relocating all research products from Climate.gov to NOAA.gov in an effort to centralize and consolidate resources. Future research products previously housed under Climate.gov will be available at NOAA.gov/climate and its affiliate websites.” That is real, dated, Primary and on this ask’s subject. It is recorded here and not made a Status event: the Quote asks that OAR’s climate research be disbanded, and relocating climate communication products between two NOAA domains is not that — “progress is measured on this ask” (§3b). The rung is unchanged. The other two in-window entries on the page are a GFDL SPEAR model publication-schedule change (2025-07-03) and a GLERL decision not to deploy environmental sample processors in Lake Erie for the 2025 season (2025-06-01); neither is a disbanding either.
• The Federal Register carries nothing on OAR: no rule, proposed rule or notice since 2025-01-20 whose text names the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research as being reorganized or closed.
• Whether individual OAR laboratories or cooperative-institute awards were terminated administratively during FY2025–FY2026 was the open question, and the OAR pages now answer the laboratory half of it: no laboratory or cooperative institute has been closed or consolidated on OAR’s own inventory as at 2026-09-03, and its Notice of Changes page announces none. The partial contingency in the earlier note is therefore not triggered. What remains unreachable is award-level termination inside individual cooperative-institute grants, which OAR does not publish.
• Overlaps #1867 (break up and downsize NOAA), which owns the agency-wide proposal.