Climate Services

Over the past several years, climate change and the climate itself have increasingly become part of our collective conscious.   Communities that likely never before thought twice about the role of atmospheric convergence or the effects of ocean currents on precipitation patterns, are now coming to realize their sensitivity to a changing climate.

And as they do, climate services and climate products geared towards these often scientifically inexperienced communities have become far more important and far more prevalent. 

As a result, many climate services and products are available for consumption by anyone from politicians to the general public.  They include palaeoclimate records, current observations, and predictions for the future on scales from international to local.  And they come from many sources.

The purpose of this website is to consolidate all of these sources.  To serve as a directory of all the available climate services and products. 

They are organized here by their provider agency.  These agencies are broken down into four categories:

1. The National Weather Service (NWS)
2. Non-NWS Government Agencies
3. Academia
4. Private Sector

Before we proceed to identify the climate service and products released by these agencies, we must assume a working definition of both the climate and climate service.

Climate:

As defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate is defined this way: “Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the “average weather,” or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to years.  The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization.  These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind.  Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system.”

And the climate system is “the highly complex system consisting of five major components: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the land surface, and the biosphere, and the interactions between them.”*

*From the IPCC Climate Change 2001: Scientific Basis Summary for Policymakers.

In a less verbose sense, our working definition of climate is the state of weather variables (i.e. temperature, precipitation, and wind) with a focus on time scales longer than the present, and attention to its role in interactions between land, life, oceans, and atmosphere.

Climate Services:

According to the NRC’s Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, a climate service is “the timely productions and delivery of useful climate data, information, and knowledge to decision makers” (NRC, 2001).  Decision makers in this context are by no means limited to politicians.  This includes the general public, as well.

The emphasis of this website has thus far been the 1st 2 aforementioned categories.  But categories 3 and 4 (Academia and the Private Sector) are in the process of further development.  If you have suggestions, additions, or improvements, please email genevieve.maricle@colorado.edu.