Climate Services of Opportunity for the Missouri Basin

There is always broad appeal for information on climate impacts and outlooks at the regional and local scales. Often national information is not defined enough or offer little explicit insight for user groups and individuals to make decisions at the watershed, state or county level for instance, where many more decisions are made. There are however certain periods of time where there are clear opportunities to provide enhanced climate information. One such time is upon us now in 2015 and into 2016 as a moderate-strong El Nino unfolds. Impacts from such events have historically been felt/realized across much of the north central portions of the U.S. in the form of above normal winter temperatures. In some of the same areas below normal precipitation commonly occurs. When the area in question is the Upper Missouri Basin, drought issues can ensue. These relatively good correlations allow us to provide climate services of opportunity where we can project an event with a 5 or 6 month lead time with some confidence. In the Northern Plains, this is a rare event. Because of the media attention focused on the pending El Nino, there is additional opportunity to capitalize on the public's heightened awareness of the event. Services include not only the multi-seasonal outlooks from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center but also include historical perspectives on impacts due to reduced snowpacks, changes in reservoir storage, energy production, navigation, irrigation, and other agricultural impacts, etc . In this presentation we will detail how a collaborative approach across federal, state, academic, other institutions builds capacity, awareness and provides potential decision making information for a broad array of users (federal, state, local, tribal governments, private, academic, NGO's, etc…) in the Missouri River Basin. We will share how this can be an example for other regional areas.

1) Strong ENSO - DEWS 2) Where you have an extreme event ongoing or just happened 3) 2 pagers

3) Regional Coordination for State and Federal Agencies (Bethany Perry, Kevin Grode), use NOAA products, have strong relationship with US Army Corps of Engineers