The NSF Unidata Program is funded almost entirely by a five-year grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Each year, the Program receives one or more “increments” of this award funding, which cover operating expenses for that year.
On 30 April, 2025, NSF instituted a funding freeze. NSF staff were instructed to stop all funding actions until further notice, ceasing provision of allotted funds for existing grants, including those to awardees (like NSF Unidata) who receive yearly increments of money from a funded grant. The freeze came at a particularly unfortunate time for NSF Unidata, as the Program was about to receive a portion of its incremental funding. As a result of the freeze, NSF Unidata faces a significant current funding gap.
To address the funding gap, nearly all Program Center staff will be furloughed as of the close of business on Friday, May 9 2025. While we do not know the duration of the furlough, we do hope that NSF is able to resume its normal funding activities in the near future, allowing us to bring everyone back to work.
During the furlough period, we will endeavor to maintain data flow via the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system and our remote-access data servers. However, we will not have resources available to address any but the most critical issues. All other activities, including responding to technical support questions, will be suspended. We encourage you to make use of expertise available in the community via our mailing lists, which will remain available for community use but not monitored by Program Center staff. Our documentation, downloads, and software artifacts servers will remain online to the extent possible. Similarly, learning resources on NSF Unidata eLearning will remain online but not be monitored.
Note that the NSF Unidata Community Survey will continue to accept submissions during the furlough period. We encourage you to provide your feedback there about issues that are important for us to work on once we return.
While we are saddened by this suspension of our activities, our commitment to providing robust access to Earth Systems Science data to the educational and research communities, along with software tools to manage and understand the data, remains unchanged. We hope to get back to normal operations and be working with you again soon.
