Consider it as a shot across the bow. Republicans on the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology managed to include language in last month's agreement for fiscal 2011 that stops the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from spending on a new Climate Service. The temporary restriction has little immediate impact, given that NOAA proposed how to create the service in its 2012 budget request, which is currently up for debate. But the administration of President Barack Obama must now re-engage with lawmakers and make its case for the service, while ensuring that the proposal is not sunk by unrelated partisan battles.

The idea is simple and worthwhile. NOAA wants to collect various climate research and reporting activities under a single umbrella, which it says will make the government machine operate more efficiently and improve the quality of data released to the public — everything from the results of satellite monitoring and climate models to regional forecasts of drought and floods. Months before the spate of storms in April hammered midwestern and southern states, for example, NOAA warned of a higher likelihood of flooding and extreme weather associated with a La Niña circulation in the Pacific Ocean.

Many are determined to conflate the word 'climate' with the debate over global warming.

House science chairman Ralph Hall (Republican, Texas) has raised concerns about moving forward without a thorough review on Capitol Hill, but a Congress-commissioned external review by the National Academy of Public Administration endorsed the reorganization in September 2010. And Congress will weigh in throughout the budget process. Hall's claims that the creation of a climate service could undermine core research at the agency are plain wrong. NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would see its budget cut by more than half, but that does not mean research is being axed. Nor is NOAA proposing anything new and grandiose at this point. The agency would merely be shifting many of its climate-related activities into a climate service.

Somehow this has become a partisan issue — 227 Republicans voted to approve a similar amendment to bar spending on the climate service during the appropriations debate back in February. It seems that many are determined to conflate the word 'climate' with the contentious debate over global-warming policy.

One of NOAA's core functions is to provide basic — and non-partisan — information on weather and climate, useful for everybody from scientists and governments to farmers, commuters and businesses. Indeed, so valuable is this information that the data themselves have become a commodity to be repackaged and sold on by private companies. The proposed reorganization would improve this service, and appropriators and lawmakers on both sides should endorse it.

Then they should focus on a bigger issue: satellite funding. This year's budget denied the first half of a two-year increase of nearly $1.2 billion for the Joint Polar Satellite System, threatening a lapse in data and less-accurate forecasting. Building on its long-term prediction, and using satellite data, NOAA accurately forecast April's extreme weather several days in advance. The storms, which still killed hundreds of Americans, are a warning worth heeding.