Enlarge / This is the Globe Sculpture at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, located on 59th Street and Columbus Circle in New York City. (credit: Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images)

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States will likely bring an end to a golden age of Earth science at NASA. While not much is known about Trump’s general space policies beyond a commitment to “global space leadership” and support for commercial spaceflight, his views on Earth science and climate change are largely in line with Republican Congressional appropriators.

Funding-wise, NASA’s Earth science programs have had a good run under the Obama administration. The agency’s Earth science budget has grown by about 50 percent during Obama’s tenure, even as much of the rest of NASA’s science budget has remained flat.

And users have responded. A week ago, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on the state of the agency’s Earth science programs, and it offered a largely favorable review. Perhaps most notable was the rapid increase in usage of data collected by NASA satellites about the planet by government agencies, scientists, private entities, and other stakeholders. Since 2000, the report found, the number of data products NASA has delivered to users rose from 8.14 million to a staggering 1.42 billion in 2015.