The Quaterly Climate Digest and Other Key Products from the EarthNow SOS Project

The quarterly climate digest, produced seasonally, consists of a 4 minute movie for NOAA Science On a Sphere (SOS) and an MP4 video accessible through YouTube. Featuring highlights from the U.S. and global analysis issued by NOAA, the climate digest conveys a visual interpretation of weather and climate conditions worldwide. This is the legacy product of the EarthNow project out of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) in collaboration with the NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab (EVL) and the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS-MD). The content for this quarterly product was informed by evaluations garnered for the monthly climate digest, omitting things audiences found boring such as statistics for individual countries and retaining content that audiences found particularly interesting such as significant weather events. The streamlined product retains global statistics but emphasizes seasonal statistics for the U.S. The digest also includes seasonal outlooks for both temperature and precipitation using CPC data for the U.S. and global data provided by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI). Data for the outlook maps are constructed primarily from climate models, with some minor tweaks by climatologists. This new global product provides a unique comprehensive prognostic outlook. Along with discussions of the quarterly climate digest, this presentation will discuss the evolution of the EarthNow project and highlight a few feature stories available on the EarthNow Blog at http://sphere.ssec.wisc.edu/