Climate assessment for the Southwest project: an integrated approach

The southwestern U.S. experiences considerable inter-annual variability in climate, due in part to the region’s strong response to El Niño and associated large-scale forcings. The link between regional climate and measurable patterns in the Pacific Ocean such as the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) provides a degree of predictability for temperature and winter precipitation in the Southwest. This combination of vulnerability and predictability make climate information, including forecasts, particularly important for decision making in a number of sectors of the Southwest economy and environment. In 1998 a pilot project, the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project was initiated with support from the Office of Global Programs (OGP) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to address integrated assessment of climate variability/change and its impacts in the Southwest. CLIMAS is designed to be a continuing process, rather than a study culminating in a single product, distinguishing it from other national and regional assessments done under the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). Although the project addresses some of the same topics as the USGCRP regional and national assessments, CLIMAS differs from these activities by being a highly participatory research and applications-oriented process. As a process it has discrete products, but not a single culminating product or ending point. CLIMAS is intended to influence decision making that already incorporates some climate information, or that could benefit from the use of such information. This process is accomplished by making the available climate and hydrologic information more accessible to stakeholders, by encouraging introduction of new information into decision-making processes where appropriate, and by initiating research to improve the climate and hydrologic information that is available. CLIMAS set up a core office to integrate natural and social science in the analysis, to integrate stakeholders into all parts of the process, and to interpret and communicate climate and hydrologic information to regional stakeholders. One of the first activities of the core office was to administer a stakeholder survey to document perceptions about the region’s climate and stakeholders’ use of climate information. Further, team members have synthesized baseline information about the state of knowledge about the region’s climate and about the climate and hydrologic forecasts. Current research activities include evaluations of seasonal precipitation and temperature forecasts, and of seasonal water-supply outlooks, as well as assessment of climate impacts on the ranching, urban water, and health sectors, and evaluation of climate vulnerability across all sectors at the community level. The insights gained from these studies provide input to the continuing assessment process, and provide a basis for developing strategies for communicating climate information to the region’s stakeholders.