A major element of the Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI) is the commitment to incorporating scientific results into decision support resources that meet national and regional requirements. At the regional level, the initiative resonates the need for advancing climate science, building scientific capacity, supporting communications between the research community and decisionmakers, and developing products that meet user needs.

The NOAA Climate Transition Program (NCTP) is a comprehensive program with a well-defined management structure for expanding regional climate services. It provides a mechanism for supporting research that addresses user needs and requirements, transitioning the research to operations, and providing education and outreach capacity for new products.

This paper discusses program details, including the proposed management structure, of NCTP. The program will support the climate community in developing collaborations for transitioning research to applications, thereby providing climate information tools to decisionmakers to take advantage of climate variability for managing risk and economic gain.