By Nicholas Bond, JISAO

I am very fortunate. My work involves research on topics of interest and importance (OK maybe I’m biased) related to the climate and oceanography of the North Pacific, and the weather of the Pacific Northwest.

My primary office is at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, in Seattle, Washington, in a lovely setting on the shore of Lake Washington. My coworkers are an interesting bunch of folks doing a variety of work ranging from the chemical oceanography of deep-sea volcanoes to the causes and effects of declining sea ice in the Arctic. This research involves the design and fabrication of innovative instrumentation, with most of this activity carried out in the laboratories and test benches on site.

It’s usually a bustling place. But these days, it’s been distressingly quiet.

The reason, of course, is the partial shutdown of the federal government, which has resulted in the furlough of “non-essential” employees of NOAA, a branch of the Department of Commerce.

I’m actually an employee of the University of Washington, so in principle, I should not be affected by the shutdown. But that’s far from the case, and my situation is by no means isolated.

The Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) at UW has about 115 employees – and 89 of them have a federal facility as their primary place of work. The JISAO contingent at the NOAA lab actually outnumbers the federal employees. And JISAO is just one of 16 cooperative institutes at universities in the U.S. through which academic and NOAA scientists collaborate.

As a principal investigator whose paycheck comes from the university, I’ve been more hampered than crippled by the shutdown. There remains a seemingly infinite amount of work that can be done: papers to read, current projects needing attention, proposals to prepare. Much of this kind of work can be done away from the office. And I must admit that I kind of enjoyed the first few days; if nothing else the phone hardly rings at the temporary office I’m using.

But now I am getting really peeved. I was counting on being able to make headway on a study of past cold-air outbreaks in the Pacific Northwest, and really need to use a web application maintained by NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory. Some other research in my pipeline requires climate model data sets hosted by NOAA, but again, no dice.

One might suppose that a slowing of the research being conducted in my field is no big deal. But there are ramifications.

Take weather forecasting. Both day-to-day forecasts and seasonal projections rely on complex computer models. These models need care and feeding; there is continual development and improvement carried out by a cadre of federal and nonfederal (academic and contractor) types. All of this is basically on hold. To be sure, forecasts are still being produced by National Weather Service personnel temporarily working for free, but it is a setback. And this kind of pause is happening all over the country, in a variety of disciplines, at research centers that collaborate with federal agencies – when the government isn’t shut down.