Design criteria for a national climate service: insights from a RISA program (INVITED PRESENTATION)

What is a national climate service? What functions should it perform? What services should it provide? How should it be designed? These are the central questions to be posed and answered as a consequence of the rapidly accumulating knowledge base to understand the dynamics of climate variability on seasonal/interannual to decadal time scales. But since the knowledge base is incomplete and large uncertainties persist over multiple space/time scales, how should such a service facilitate learning between the producers of this information and actual or potential users? How is it most useful to define and design "products" and how are these most effectively introduced? We shall approach these questions in a "bottom-up" manner by mining the experiences of one RISA program in the Pacific Northwest to use lessons learned over a decade of existence for crafting an approach to system design of wider applicability.