Improving Climate Content in the NWS Services for Building a Weather- and Climate- Ready Nation

The NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) is a trusted outlet for weather, water, and climate information to the US public. NWS provides NOAA’s core climate services at subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) timescales, at national, regional, and local levels, including climate observations, monitoring, predictions, service delivery, and decision support. With increased public awareness of climatic impacts on human habitat and infrastructure, NWS is experiencing a growing demand for a broader scope of climate information and better climatological context of products and services. The most common examples of such needs include attribution of hazardous weather and water events to climate variability and change, local climatological risks, historical analogs for existing atmospheric conditions, trends in local weather variables, longer-term climate outlooks, and qualitative and quantitative information on climatic impacts in different areas of people’s activities and concerns.

In 2023, the NWS Climate Services Program conducted and documented extensive engagement activities with local offices and key partners. The goals of these engagements were to 1) improve and strengthen the coordination between NWS local offices, regions, and national centers, 2) further product and service equity of climate related themes, and 3) support building a Climate Ready Nation and Weather Ready Nation as defined by NWS and NOAA Strategic Plan respectively. The engagement activities included surveys, a national strategic meeting, and focus groups. The engagement outcomes included a comprehensive summary of actions and recommendations for improving NWS climate services to better address user needs and support implementation of the NOAA’s strategic plan on Building a Climate Ready Nation (CRN).

The reports of these engagements served as guiding instruments for developing the NWS Climate Services Roadmap for 2025-2027 for four key working themes, overarching methods, and desired outcomes as described by Timofeyeva-Livezey et al. (2024, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0284.1) and included:

• Improving climate observations, monitoring, and prediction.
• Incorporating multi-timescale climate information into NWS products and services.
• Applying climate information to NWS service areas and societal challenges.
• Providing collaborated climate messages and decision support.

The Roadmap defines planned activities for each of these themes and describes deliverables, methods for implementation, and metrics for measuring success. Implementing the Roadmap will broaden climate information provided in the NWS local, regional, and national offices by better leveraging NOAA informational resources, integrate climate information in the NWS operational weather and water services, improve consistency and equity of the NWS climate services, provide interpretive services of climate products for application in climate-sensitive decisions, assess the usability of products and information for partners’ critical decision making, and communicate climatological risks and their impacts on communities and economy.