Consistent with the goals of NOAA's strategic plan, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the National Research Council's Climate Services Vision, the National Weather Service (NWS) has been working with its NOAA partners since 1999 to improve climate services to the nation. The NWS has a special interest and part to play in this effort because it is responsible for (1) the observing systems on which the nation's historic climate record is based and (2)the production and delivery of official climate predictions from intraseasonal to decadal time scales. A critical component of this effort is the mobilization of NWS regional and field personnel to contribute to the national program. This is a natural evolution for NOAA climate services because NWS (through its field offices) operates NOAA's only extensive network of customer interfaces encompassing the entire United States and territories. These offices are already the main point of entry for customer requests for climate services.

The NWS Pacific Region was first of six to develop a climate services program through its partnership in the Pacific ENSO Applications Center. A prototype program for NWS North American Regions was initiated in the Western Region in 2002 and has been followed by establishment of programs in the Alaska, Central, Eastern, and Southern Regions in 2003. A national implementation plan was developed, Program Managers and/or Teams were appointed in all six regional headquarters, focal points were named in all 133 NWS field offices, organizational meetings were held in all six regions, and the development of regional plans initiated in 2003. In 2001 NWS commenced the development of a suite of training modules, including residence training, webcasts, and teletraining, to establish climate services competency in its field offices and almost all of the modules have been implemented.

Field office focal points have three important roles to play and each of these requires close cooperation and coordination with regional and/or local partners, including State Climatologists (SCs), Regional Climate Centers (RCCs), NOAA laboratories or university-based centers and facilities, and the private sector. Focal point roles consist of (1)acting as the customer interface for climate services, (2)providing stewardship of NWS-based historical records, and (3)assisting local customers of NWS climate forecast products and providing local expertise for these products, including extending the forecasts to NWS observing sites through downscaling.

As a customer interface, role (1), the focal point needs to be able to make savvy referrals. Web-based materials, both resource material and locations of resources, provided by regional and national managers can assist the focal point in these referrals. But in order to be fully successful, the focal point has to be in communication with partners (particularly his SC, his RCC, and nearby academics)in order to understand what their capabilities and preferred roles are. He/she must also be sensitive in this role to public/private partnership considerations.

In role (2), contributing to the stewardship of the U.S. historical climate record, the focal point should act as the local office conscience ensuring that climate community requirements for NWS observations are being met. Even if he/she is not directly in charge of these things, he/she should be concerned about metadata recording, timely sharing of performance and quality-control information, sufficient overlapping observations for bias corrections when observations are changed in any way, etc. To succeed in this second role, the focal point must work cooperatively with his RCC, his Regional Program Manager, his SC (where appropriate). and the National Climate Data Center. Protocols and tools for these interactions need to developed and implemented.

Finally, within the NWS, local offices obviously have the most familiarity with observing sites they are responsible for, the vagaries of the local climate and its variability, and the needs of local customers. Thus, it is highly desirable that the central producer of NWS climate forecast guidance and official forecast products, the Climate Prediction Center (CPC), be able to leverage this local expertise. One way to achieve this is through coordinated field office input to CPC team forecast and monitoring products (like the Drought Outlook). Another way is through extension of CPC products to the local level through statistical downscaling and composite analyses. These extensions must be done using approved approaches developed through partnerships between CPC, Regional Managers, and partner laboratories, to ensure consistent official products at all spatial scales.

The common thread for success in playing all three of the local climate services focal point roles is strong partnerships at the regional and local levels. Another requirement is training. NWS is devoting substantial attention and resources to both of these priorities and these efforts are addressed in two other conference papers.