Assistance program
Climate and Atmospheric Research
$501.4 Million committed in FY2018–FY2026
- Agency
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Commerce, Department of
- Assistance
- Project Grants
- CFDA number
- 11.431
- What it does
- Climate variability and change present society with significant economic, health, safety, and security challenges. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has the vision, mission and a set of strategic goals to build a Climate Ready-Nation. The Climate Program Office (CPO) supports this vision as part of the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR). A CPO core function is to support extramural research through a competitive grants process. CPO’s programs span foundational, cross-disciplinary climate sciences, assessments, capacity building, tool development, and education. CPO collaborates closely with partners within NOAA and with the broader academic, Federal, Tribal nations, international bodies, and private sector community. CPO works in close partnership with the OAR laboratories and programs to complement and support their in-house research. CPO also works with other parts of NOAA to support their mission areas in weather, oceans, fisheries, and service delivery. CPO further builds networks, coalitions, and collaborations, converges around the best ideas, and provides support to accelerate emerging innovation across the climate enterprise. Undertaking a range of climate science and services initiatives, CPO helps our Nation and the world address climate-related challenges and pursue solution-focused opportunities. CPO’s definition of climate services is comprehensive, encompassing not only the development and dissemination of actionable climate science to inform decision making, but also the partnerships to engage in and understand the social and policy contexts within which climate-relevant decisions are made. CPO fulfills NOAA’s mandated responsibilities under the National Climate Program Act, the Global Change Research Act and its National Climate Assessment, and the National Integrated Drought Information System Act, and similar international endeavors such as the World Climate Research Program.
- Who benefits
- Organizations and individuals with interests in meteorology, oceanography, and climate research and prediction.
- Who applies
- Institutions of higher education, other nonprofits, commercial organizations, international organizations, state, local and Indian tribal governments.
Committed by fiscal year
* FY2026 is year-to-date — the fiscal year is still in progress, so its total is still filling in. The striped band and dashed line mark that provisional stretch.
Top recipients
By dollars committed.
How to read these numbers
- Committed through this program
Money committed under this assistance listing (its CFDA program), counted in the year each action happened.
- How it's paid
Most programs pay out one way — a grant, or a direct payment to individuals; the flow bar only appears when a program genuinely mixes types.
- Some recipients aren't itemized
For entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, the government reports one aggregate instead of naming tens of millions of people, so the recipient roster isn't part of the public record.
- Awards, counted once
An award count is the number of distinct awards with at least one action that year — each counted once, however many times it was amended.
- The colored bars
Every bar on this page splits by how the money moves:
Direct payments