Accelerating Climate Research, Development, and Transition to Operations for Building a Weather-Ready Nation

The National Weather Service (NWS) Climate Services Program is striving to meet the growing number of requests from American citizens and organizations for additional information at sub-seasonal and seasonal (S2S) time scales to support their decision making and to build community resilience. The current suite of climate products and services do not adequately meet user needs, and their requests can be summarized in six major areas for development or improvement and subsequent transition into operations of NWS climate products and services:

• Improve basic NWS forecasting capabilities at S2S time scales
• Provide extended lead-time information and Decision Support Services for weather and climate extremes for planning and preparedness, including hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, extreme heat, winter storms
• Improve NWS capabilities for decision support in the Arctic including Arctic Sea Ice predictions and outlooks
• Improve NWS capabilities to provide climate information in support of decision making in coastal regions
• Establish a learning path for making climate-informed decisions in NOAA field operations and users applications of NOAA climate products, forecasts, and services
• Improve NWS capabilities for climate-timescale decision support services for water resources

NWS is the operational arm of NOAA, and thus works with NOAA’s Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) and academia to identify research, development, and transition needs based on NWS’ strategic areas for advancing mission delivery of climate services. These high level strategic areas are foundational concepts for building on capabilities out seven to ten years into the future, with the specific goals of improving the skill of NWS’ climate products; building regional and local decision support capacity for S2S services; a highly-trained professional staff in climate science and services; strong partnerships for advancing science and service delivery; and the next generation climate model and associated updated reforecasts and reanalysis.

Impact-based decision support services (IDSS) is the overarching paradigm within which NWS delivers weather, water, and climate-related services. The NWS Climate Services Program will evaluate the feasibility of improving decision support services for heat and health, fire weather, water resources, and national security. This paper will discuss specific projects that are currently under development.