By THE ALASKA STORY
Aug. 15, 2026 – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will no longer coordinate the annual Arctic Report Card, ending the agency’s role in producing and promoting a publication that has tracked environmental changes across Alaska and the circumpolar North for two decades.
“Coordination of the 2026 Arctic Report Card will not be facilitated through NOAA,” NOAA Communications Director Kim Doster said in a statement provided to news organizations.
The decision does not end NOAA’s collection of Arctic weather, ocean, ice and climate information. Data historically supplied by the agency for the report will continue to be gathered and made publicly available.
Instead, NOAA is withdrawing from the administrative and production work required to turn that information into a coordinated annual report. That has traditionally included providing editors, organizing outside peer review, producing graphics and videos, maintaining the report’s website and handling publicity and media events. The media has long used the report to push a climate change narrative.
The Arctic Report Card reached its 20th edition in 2025. That edition was published as a NOAA Technical Report and contained 14 essays prepared by 112 scientists from 13 countries. Its independent peer review was organized by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme Secretariat.
The publication examined surface air temperatures, precipitation, sea ice, snow cover, glaciers, the Greenland Ice Sheet, ocean temperatures, primary productivity and changes in tundra vegetation. More recent editions have also included essays incorporating Indigenous observations and traditional knowledge, a departure from the report’s core measurements of physical environmental conditions. The publication was drifting.
Alaska scientists have been deeply involved in the project. Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and one of the editors of the planned 2026 report, said the non-NOAA editors learned about the decision during a regular meeting with staff from NOAA’s Arctic Research Program.
Thoman subsequently informed the lead authors working on the 2026 edition, according to Eos, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
Work on the 2026 report was already underway and was expected to be completed within several months. Editors and authors are now considering whether another organization can take over the coordination and whether the report can continue independently of NOAA. They are looking for a workaround.
