UW prof in political storm as Trump targets national weather lab

Shuyi Chen has flown into Category 5 hurricanes to conduct meteorological experiments, so she knows about turbulence.

But those missions didn't wholly prepare the University of Washington professor for her latest challenge: navigating an intense political storm.

An expert on extreme weather, Chen currently chairs the academic nonprofit that manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research. That means she and like-minded scientists are now in a battle with President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration announced plans in December to dismantle the longstanding research hub based in Colorado, unnerving meteorologists like Chen who rely on the national center for logistical and technical support.

White House officials have accused the research center of "climate alarmism" and blasted the "woke direction" of certain initiatives. Chen says it plays an essential role in research that helps governments and businesses predict and guard against the effects of weather such as hurricanes, wildfires and the atmospheric rivers that have been flooding Western Washington.

Although the center is based in Colorado, it assists and collaborates with scientists at colleges and universities across the country.

"This is a national resource that enables all of us to do better," Chen said.

The nonprofit Chen chairs, called the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, has sued to block the national lab's shutdown, accusing Trump of targeting it as political retaliation against Colorado Democrats.

Speaking on her own behalf, rather than on behalf of the nonprofit or the UW, Chen declined to comment on the lawsuit. But Robert Houze, a UW meteorology professor emeritus who served as Chen's postdoctoral adviser decades ago, said he hopes the legal challenge prevails and praised Chen's grit as she rallies scientists across the country to defend the research center.

Chen, 67, grew up in China during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which separated her from her father and disrupted her education, Houze noted.

Yet she came through that adversity, Houze said. Chen flew into hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. She has testified before Congress multiple times.

"She's a fighter," Houze said.

Predicting atmospheric rivers

Remember the heavy rainstorms that flooded Western Washington in December? The deluges that forced entire communities to evacuate and caused $182 million in damage to public roads, bridges and buildings?

Those downpours were generated by a series of powerful atmospheric rivers, which occur when long belts of water vapor stream across the sky.

Atmospheric rivers dump rain when they hit coastal mountain ranges and shed their moisture. But they can start to develop thousands of miles away, above the Indian and western Pacific oceans. Every 30 to 60 days, warm temperatures push huge amounts of evaporating water into the air and strong winds carry it northeast.

This phenomenon is called the Madden-Julian Oscillation (named after two scientists from the national lab) and Chen has been researching it since the early 1990s, traveling to remote islands to take measurements and devising mathematical models to map its behavior.

Weather forecasts can already provide regional warnings in the days before rainstorms arrive, thanks to work by researchers and meteorologists.

But additional research in the atmosphere and on the ground could extend that prediction timeline and better forecast its granular impacts, Chen said.

"Flooding is very local," she said. "It's about more than just precipitation."

If officials had months to prepare for a sequence of powerful atmospheric rivers and knew exactly where the storms were going to cause flooding, they could take better steps to prevent harm, the UW professor said.

These are important aims, because extreme events like atmospheric rivers are becoming more common and destructive, Chen added.

The work is complicated and expensive, however. Scientists need airplanes to borrow, massive data sets to access and a whole lot of computing power.

Lab's important role

That's where the National Center for Atmospheric Research comes in, Chen said. Established by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1960 and funded by Congress ever since, it employs more than 800 people with a mandate to coordinate and accelerate cutting-edge earth system research.

The idea for a national center emerged after weather forecasts helped the U.S. plan operations like the D-Day invasion and win World War II, Chen said, and as officials realized the field was too large for universities to tackle alone.

Among other things, the center lends airplanes for research missions, organizes scientific expeditions to other countries, hosts databases used by meteorologists all over the world and maintains a supercomputer that researchers use to run their complex weather models. Its annual budget is about $125 million.

"I couldn't have done these projects just using what we have at the UW," Chen said about her extreme weather work. "It wouldn't be possible."

That's why many U.S. scientists are speaking out against the Trump administration's plans to take apart the Colorado hub, said Houze, who recently helped write an opposition letter signed by 111 researchers.

Houze worries the national changes could interrupt research that has spanned multiple generations of scientists; Chen's graduate students are now advancing work that Houze began and that Chen continued, he said.

"It's heartbreaking, because this has been a system that has worked well for a long time and we've made a lot of progress," Houze said.

Legal, political battle

The Trump administration's December announcement said it "remains committed to providing world-class infrastructure for weather modeling, space weather research and other critical functions.

But the administration has indicated it wants to take away the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming supercomputer and airplanes, narrow the scope of its work, and transfer ownership of its Colorado facility, possibly for private use. This is what the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the consortium of more than 129 colleges and universities that Chen chairs, is now trying to halt.

The nonprofit's lawsuit claims the administration's actions pose "a direct threat to America's national security, public safety and economic prosperity."

Although a spokesperson for Trump's National Science Foundation said last week the agency is "working closely with all parties to … minimize disruption to critical scientific capabilities, the university group's lawsuit accuses the Republican president's administration of making unjustified, unlawful and unconstitutional changes without proper warning.

It alleges the attack on the research center is part of Trump seeking to punish Colorado for using mail-in voting and for prosecuting Tina Peters, a county clerk. She was convicted in 2024 for tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to prove Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.

Trump promised "harsh measures" in calling last year for Peters to be released and cited the state's mail-in voting in deciding to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama, the nonprofit's lawsuit points out.

The Trump administration recently denied disaster relief for the state and has terminated $109 million in transportation funding for Colorado on the same day it announced its plans to break up the weather lab.

The political and legal battle has rattled up-and-coming scientists like Chad Small, a UW graduate student working under Chen. Small is wondering whether research opportunities may decrease in the coming years.

"I don't think there's anyone in the field who isn't thinking about it," he said.

In the meantime, Small has watched Chen's nonprofit work keep her busy and put her under pressure. The grad student said he admires his adviser's steady leadership amid the chaos, which evokes a meteorological analogy.

"There's always an eye inside the hurricane," Chen said.

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This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 6:42 AM.