Why Germany is building an ark for US climate data
Grist · LC · trust 43/100
In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new “racks” — gray metal casings that hold computing hardware — alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center, or DKRZ, one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data. The new equipment will add about 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already stored here. One petabyte of data is equivalent to the storage space needed for roughly 200 million high-resolution images.
Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s mission is to provide computing power and storage to the German climate science community. But these new racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: They will store backup versions of climate simulations from the other side of the Atlantic. The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by U.S. scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of President Trump, which has slashed funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and sought to prevent satellites from collecting key climate data.
Leaders of German science organizations publicly cite these actions as their primary motivation for creating backups. The German Research Foundation, the country’s main science funding body, believes that the Trump administration could block European access to data and research findings stored in the U.S. “The deletion of data has also become a possibility,” said the foundation’s program manager, Kathrin Winkler, “and there is a risk that [data] could be manipulated to skew findings in a desired direction.”
Trust in U.S. science policy has fallen to a low point in Europe, and fears of losing scientific data are mounting. The U.S. government quit both the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in January, though U.S. researchers are still contributing to global climate science. To support them, the German Research Foundation in late 2025 set up a program , with a budget of $35 million, to provide a safe haven for permanently storing copies of U.S. data from public and open sources.
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The DKRZ project is called CMIP7-ark — a lifeboat for the U.S. contribution to the seventh IPCC assessment. Six other projects for U.S. science datasets, with names like SHIELD and SEND (Secure Endangered Earth Data), have also received funding. Christopher Kadow, head of the data analysis division at the DKRZ, said, “We cannot simply accept that important contributions might be lost for technical or political reasons.”
Data collections form the foundation of all empirical science. Climate, environmental, and biodiversity research relies on countless historical and contemporary datasets. Some of these collections, such as the iconic time series of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations made at Hawai‘i’s Mauna Loa Observatory, have been ongoing for decades and are critical for tracking environmental change. (In 2025, the Trump administration tried to defund and close the observatory, but later Congress rejected its proposed cuts.)
While detailed datasets are essential for research, it is not standard procedure to back them up in alternate locations. Most scientific datasets are physically stored on hard drives or magnetic tapes at the universities or institutions where they are generated. One simple reason for this is that, until recently, the world seemed safe enough that scientists saw no need for off-site backups. Another reason is that transferring and storing such large amounts of information is complicated. Sending petabytes of data through the internet takes months, and renting faster fiber optic cables can be extremely costly. Often, the most cost-effective way to transfer large volumes of data is to put them on hard drives or far cheaper magnetic tapes and send them through the “sneakernet,” which means they are physically transported by car, plane, or ship.
Still, the process is expensive and arduous, so most datasets have been kept in just one place. But in a world where political upheaval, cyberattacks, and armed conflicts are becoming more frequent, this practice is increasingly considered to be precarious. “If data is stored at only one site, there is a much greater risk of loss from events such as extreme weather or infrastructure failure,” said Eleanor O’Rourke, the U.K.-based director of the International Project Office of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which coordinates global climate models for the IPCC’s assessments. Climate simulations for the IPCC are now considered so critical that overseas repositories are thought necessary for all contributions.
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Until recently, the idea that the U.S. science community would have to track or rescue lost datasets was unthinkable. After all, environmental data generated or funded by U.S. government agencies was paid for by taxpayers and generally remains in the public domain. Yet these datasets exist in physical forms at specific locations and require dedicated experts to maintain them, which makes them vulnerable to human interference, as well as natural disasters, technical problems like short circuits or battery explosions, and neglect. “The data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked — until they disappear,” data experts Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney warned recently.
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