BENGALURU/JAKARTA – Udit Bhatia, a civil and computer science engineer in one of India’s top technical institutes is growing anxious as political events put his work in jeopardy. The Trump administration’s ongoing budget cuts in US federal agencies are threatening to disrupt worldwide weather and ocean measurements that are vital to global governments and agencies in forecasting and early warnings, and disaster resilience research done by the likes of Dr Bhatia. …Critical datasets that his laboratory relies on are generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), America’s primary oceanic science and meteorological body. The NOAA’s National Centres for Environmental Information monitor and archive data on temperature, precipitation, wind speeds and humidity levels 130+ observing platforms across the globe, including those in the Indian Ocean that are relevant for Dr Bhatia. …it is a reminder that we need redundancies in global and regional data gathering “to protect the overall prediction enterprise from political vagaries.