GIS development of the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program

The Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP) is a NOAA-supported Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program that serves the climate research and information needs of the south- central United States. SCIPP focuses on several critical climate issues in the Southern U.S., including multi-hazard preparedness (severe storms, droughts, floods, hurricanes, extreme temperatures, etc.) as well as coastal inundation and land subsidence. SCIPP addresses these regional climate issues by developing strong relationships with decision makers, conducting pertinent and regionally relevant scientific research, and providing critical information products, tools, and education to stakeholders region-wide.

Because the vast majority of the data needed for stakeholder decision making is geospatial, the plan is to create an all-hazards GIS portal that provides historical climate risk profiles for local-level hazard mitigation planning processes, develop new GIS tools to provide climate model forecast information, generate new GIS products based on stakeholder input, provide web-GIS climate information products, and prepare climate risk assessments for each of the regional hazards.

While the project is still in the stakeholder-engagement stage, SCIPP has begun to develop demonstration tools and products so that stakeholders can see the capabilities of the proposed tools and provide informed feedback. This presentation will focus on efforts thus far, describe the data used by SCIPP, and illustrate some of the preliminary capabilities and direction of the demonstration tools developed for the stakeholder feedback phase.