Extended Abstract (72K)3.7
Climate services: An assessment and a prediction
Kelly T. Redmond, DRI, Reno, NV
At the 1995 meeting of the American Meteorological Society in Dallas, Stan Changnon surveyed the history of applied climatology and pondered whether its future would match its past. In the relatively short time that has since passed, the factors that help determine this future have begun to provides hints and clues regarding its prospective directions. As noted by the National Research Council, climate services is slowly being re-defined to include a richer and more diverse range of endeavor. By its nature, climate services operates primarily at boundaries, seeking to connect a steadily growing core of knowledge about the behavior of an immensely complicated physical system with a range of needs that spans nearly every facet of human concern. Those concerns increasingly encompass the environment in which humans operate and upon which they depend. The potential for changes in climate, what to do about this possibility, and the complicated and nuanced interplay between this body of information and the world of real decisions, have together acted as a catalyst to develop better understanding of how climate knowledge has been and is now used, or misused, or not used. An outcome has been more thorough and rigorous studies of the interface between knowledge and its application. They have discovered, perhaps re-discovered, that since a significant fraction of this knowledge transfer takes place at the smaller scales, e.g., that of an individual organism. From his own experiences Stan Changnon recognized this early on, and has been a consistent champion of structures at the regional, state and local levels, where much of the transfer takes place, to provide an effective suite of services. The increasing recognition that our most pressing problems call for interdisciplinary approaches bodes well for climate services, which inherently entails, indeed requires, bridging and linking across interfaces. Even in the presence of some forces to the contrary (such as science and technical literacy), a steady influx of fresh minds, continuing developments in technology, a resurgence of interest in the necessity for good historical records and high quality ongoing observations, a nearly continuous stream of discoveries that now extend more deeply into into the biosphere, and improved understanding of the behavior of complex systems, when taken as a whole, all suggest that climate services actually has a very bright future. As Stan has himself pointed out, the field is quite large and there is room for many players.
Session 3, The Lifelong work of Stan Changnon (Invited Presentations) (Room 619/620)
Tuesday, 13 January 2004, 11:00 AM-5:30 PM, Room 619/620
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