Climate Decision Support Services: Building a Climate-Ready Community

Under the Weather-Ready Nation roadmap, climate is frequently cited as a component of impact-based decision support services (IDSS). In practice, at the local and regional levels, weather often dominates the IDSS conversations. Nonetheless, NWS engages with many climate-sensitive sectors and entities, and it is critical to develop a component of IDSS that contributes climate-scale information that is integrated with weather information to create a more complete basis for decisions. Within the realm of climate services, NWS is linked strongly to state and regional climatologists as well as other partners in federal government and universities, and that is just scratching the surface. These partnerships facilitate our ability to provide IDSS given the varying levels of climate expertise in field offices. In this presentation, examples of climate infusion into IDSS at the local and regional level will be given. The available climate resources are often underutilized and vulnerable to misinterpretation, and climate training resources are available to aid use and interpretation of climate tools, outlooks, and information; these also will also be discussed. Climate information can be used to support IDSS before, during, and after events, by anticipating patterns favorable for certain weather conditions and by placing those conditions into historical context.