Communities and businesses around the world are sensitive to seasonal and year-to-year fluctuations in the climate. Consequently, they desire the means to plan, adjust, and adapt to climatic variability. Accordingly, several agencies within the public and private sectors, as well as academia, have developed climate services and products to meet these needs. The result is a proliferation of climate services across sectors.

Thus, both the demand and the supply of climate information are high. And yet many farmers, water managers, and highway administrators do not currently use climate products in their planning decisions. Often, they do not know the breadth of what is available to them and they haven’t found products that directly meet their needs. There is, therefore, a gap between the supply and demand of climate services.

The Climate Services Clearinghouse (CSC), an online searchable database of all climate services across sectors, seeks to reconcile this gap. It coordinates and displays services from NOAA, other federal and state agencies, academia, and the private sector as a means to provide a comprehensive perspective of climate services to both their producers and potential users. Additionally, through several focus group meetings with CSC users, the Clearinghouse operates as an intermediary between stakeholders and researchers in order to facilitate connections between these two groups.

This presentation assesses the value of coordinating climate services as a means of reconciling supply and demand, and examines the progress of the CSC in its role as intermediary between stakeholders and researchers.