Program Charter For Climate Services Development

Program Charter Date: March 27, 2008
Program Manager: Margaret Davidson
Climate Goal Team Lead: Chet Koblinksy

Executive Summary
The Climate Services Development (CSD) 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 decision makers in improving management of the sectors and areas that are sensitive to impacts from weather and climate. This includes 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 CSD provides includes observations, monitoring, analysis, modeling, forecasts, assessments, supporting datasets, and stakeholder driven research and applications.

The CSD Program is addressing 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. The CSD Program links producers and users of climate information, allowing decision maker 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. Increasing demand for climate services are met through research into decision maker needs and prototype product development; transition of research products into application and operations; and operational delivery and support of climate services. CSD relies heavily on NOAA's extensive infrastructure with more than 150 offices at the national, regional and local levels contributing, as well as their partners working at the international, national, regional, state, and local levels.

Download the full Climate Services Development Program Charter Document (PDF)