The recent El Niño event provided an ideal opportunity for the Climate Diagnostics Center to exploit the power of the Web in response to the heightened public interest in, and heavy media coverage of, El Niño. As this event wanes, we are evaluating the results and effectiveness of our outreach efforts. This discussion reviews our motivations and approaches to answering the demand for El Niño information, identifies the issues encountered, and summarizes the lessons learned which can be applied to outreach efforts for similar climate events.
As the El Niño event began in 1997, so did the demand for information. At that time, a limited amount of ENSO-specific information existed on the Web. Since research activities at CDC include a significant ENSO component, we had some obvious strengths for presenting a cohesive and thorough set of Web documents. The CDC web site already contained quite a few ENSO-related products and documents, but it was not organized in a focused way. Re-organizing the information already available at CDC immediately benefited both the general public and CDC scientists, who then had an efficient means of quickly gathering the information needed to answer the increasing number of questions posed by external scientists, the general public, and the media.
Although we included links to some other sites in our El Niño Web pages, most of our focus was on the science and products of CDC. Interactive processes such as our electronic atlas1 were updated to include guidelines for evaluating El Niño effects. The atlas software was also used as the foundation for distributing data and information specific to ENSO (e.g., http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/impact_assess/). Links to these processes, as well as animations, forecasts and indices generated at CDC, were gathered in one Web document for ease of access.
The results of our efforts are clearly reflected in the feedback from both internal and external users, and the CDC Web server statistics. Prior to the installation of the El Niño documents, our server recorded approximately 450,000 Web hits per month (this number includes all documents and images). In October 1997, we reached a high of 1.6 million accesses, with the El Niño documents and images among the most frequently transferred. The success of these documents depended on our early awareness of the demand for El Niño information and our ability to build upon resources we already had on hand. We discovered that a "FAQ" is essential, as many questions from the public follow similar themes. Distributing El Niño information in a summary format understandable to the public, yet without compromising the science, also proved challenging. We are currently updating our Web documents with more emphasis on the La Niña phase of ENSO, and are working to identify other research areas that are suitable for a similar, focused Web treatment.
1. Scott, J. D., M. A. Alexander, J. A. Collins, and C. A. Smith, 1997: Interactive Visualization of Climate Data on the World Wide Web. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 78(9), 1985-1989.