Climate Services Development

Program Highlights for FY 2009

The Climate Services Development Program assesses impacts of climate variability and change, supports regional adaptation strategies, and develops climate information products and tools appropriate for evolving user needs. The program supports decisionmakers by providing information to improve management of the sectors and geographic areas that are sensitive to impacts from weather and climate. Management issues include annual losses from droughts and floods, heat and cold waves, the positive and negative impacts of El Niño and La Niña events, sea—level rise, and other high—impact climate events. The information the program provides includes assessments, supporting data sets, and stakeholder—driven research and applications.

The program addresses an increased demand for traditional climate services such as data and forecast dissemination and customer support, as well as identifying and satisfying new requirements for information on long—term climate trends; linkages between climate variability, climate change, and weather extremes; assessments of vulnerability; and decision support in sectors such as drought and water management, fire, emergency preparedness, health, transportation, energy, coastal, urban, and ecosystem management. Demand for increased services is met through research of decisionmaker needs, prototype product development, transition of research products into operations, and operational delivery and support. The National Integrated Drought Information System (www.drought.gov) is a new example of NOAA's leadership in the development of issue—focused climate services.

The program links producers and users of climate information, allowing decisionmaker—inspired creation of new knowledge, processes, tools, and products to improve planning, risk management, resource allocation, impacts assessment, adaptation, mitigation, early warning, and operational response in sectors sensitive to climate variability and change. The program relies heavily on NOAA's extensive U.S. infrastructure with more than 150 offices at the national, regional, and local levels contributing. The program also leverages partners at the international, national, regional, State, and local levels, as well as academia.

Activities in FY 2009 will:

• Develop decision—support tools, such as climate—fisheries models and web—based climate—agriculture tools
• Increase the understanding of regional climate impacts through basic and applied research and diagnostic and modeling studies
• Develop methodologies and decision—support tools focused on sea—level rise, extreme events and community planning, climate and integrated ecosystem management, climate extension in coastal regions, and climate and urban drainage systems
• Continue—through the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments Program—to enhance integration of regional programs with applied research capabilities to strengthen end—to—end development and provision of climate information services
• Continue to develop the National Integrated Drought Information System
• Continue development of the U.S. Drought Portal in conjunction with Federal partners (USGS, NASA, and USDA) and non—Federal partners (Drought Mitigation Center and the Earth Systems Integrated Enterprise)
• Continue development of the next—generation Climate Forecast System (CFS) and of a multi—model ensemble prediction system with CFS to accelerate the transition of research advances to new and improved objective drought monitoring and prediction products.

Source: www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/ocp2009/ocp2009—doc.htm