WRCC Climate Service Linkages to AASC and RISA Partners

A robust national climate services structure includes a suite of critical core components operating over a range of geographic scales. Major activity areas encompass data and all associated issues, product generation and dissemination, service delivery, and research on the physical climate system and on the social dimensions of service provision. This talk will describe several activities and projects presently under way at the Western Regional Climate Center that illustrate linkages and interdependencies among entities that operate at state, regional, and national scales. Many of these partners have traditionally interacted for many decades as members of the American Association of State Climatologists. The more recent Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program specializes in understanding more deeply the decision environment within which climate information is acquired, considered, and incorporated. The RISA Program complements these prior ongoing and in many cases quasi-operational activities, and offers excellent opportunities to probe the complex relationship between two worlds, that of the provision and that of the use of climate information.