Regional Climate Services: Example from the Northeast Regional Climate Center

The Northeast Regional Climate Center’s (NRCC) role as partner in providing climate services from national to regional to state levels is described using three examples. In the first, the integration of data from multiple state-specific mesonets via the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS) is discussed. The assimilation of these data allow a suite of agricultural decision tools focused mainly on fruit and vegetable crops to be shared with practitioners in nearly 25 states. The second example describes access to downscaled climate model projections. Here via the ACIS infrastructure, states can access the appropriate data directly via web service calls from their own software. Thus, the NRCC serves as a central repository and data access portal for, not only these projections, but historical and real time observations as well. Finally, we focus on access to real-time NOAA observations and short-term forecasts via the National Digital Forecast Database, showing an application for suburban water conservation that serves municipal water utilities in multiple states.