Climate Monitoring Summit
19-20 October 2010
Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
University of Maryland Research Park (M-Square)
5825 University Research Court, College Park, MD
Sponsored by
the University of Maryland's Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center
and NOAA's Climate Prediction Center
with support and participation from
the Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR)
As we move forward with the NOAA Climate Service, we seek input
from key scientists from our facilities to develop a path for
enhancing climate monitoring across the agency. As a first step, the
NOAA Climate Service Corporate Team is organizing a workshop on this
subject to be held in College Park, MD on Oct 19-20, 2010.
Participants will be charged to develop a common understanding of
current NOAA climate monitoring activities, identify key climate
monitoring challenges and opportunities, and define a process for
enhancing climate monitoring. This path should be consistent with the
new NOAA Next Generation
Strategic Plan and should engage our customers and partners.
Workshop Objectives:
- Given a working definition of climate monitoring for NOAA,
determine areas of overlap and gaps in NOAA's climate monitoring
enterprise as a first step towards helping users know what to use
and believe.
- Identify how indices currently being monitored are related,
coordinated, updated and explained to users.
- Identify how climate monitoring products should be disseminated
(e.g., via the NOAA Climate Portal) and communicated.
- Develop recommendations to help facilitate use of NOAAs working definition of climate
monitoring, and identify major users of NOAA monitoring products and potential
partners who should be consulted as we enhance climate monitoring activities.
While the global climate observing system enables climate monitoring,
the summit will not address challenges with the observing system,
which are viewed as another important task.
Anticipated Outcomes:
A "Climate Monitoring Report" that summarizes
challenges and opportunities, with recommendations for enhancing
climate monitoring across NOAA, will be delivered to NOAA Leadership
following the Summit. Concepts such as the role of research in climate
monitoring, links between monitoring and attribution, and needs for
improved quality control and analysis methods will be discussed. The
Report is intended to define a path forward for a coordinated suite of
monitoring products and services within NOAA that responds to user
needs. While the CMS is a first step in the process, we anticipate
future activities focused on external engagement to ensure that NOAA
climate monitoring activities meet user needs.
Registration
While registration for the Summit is free, we request a separate
$30 fee to cover the cost of lunch and refreshments for both days of
the meeting. Since there are no restaurants at the meeting site,
having lunch delivered saves time. The logistics information, (PDF, 412 KB)
and the registration web
page both give details on lunch delivery choices arranged for the
meeting.
Intended Participants:
Representatives from NOAA line offices and programs that currently
have climate monitoring efforts underway. The workshop will be limited
~30-40 participants.
Workshop Format:
This two-day meeting will consist of brief presentations related to the 4
objectives stated above and working group discussions that will lead
to the development of a set of recommendations for coordinating
monitoring across NOAA, including mechanisms (e.g. climate monitoring
board) that would need to be in place to ensure improvements.
Summit organizers:
DRAFT Working Definition of Climate Monitoring
Enabled by global observations, climate monitoring analyzes,
documents, and provides data and information on the changing state of
the climate and its impacts. Monitoring activities include analysis,
interpretation, and placement into historical perspective of these
data and are supported by ingest, storage and quality control. Climate
monitoring enhances attribution, assessment, modeling, and predictive
understanding.
Background:
The CMS Technical Team provided this DRAFT Working Definition of
Climate Monitoring for use at the CMS. The Team recommends
that workshop participants develop recommendations to help facilitate
its use as part of the Breakout 4 discussion. Recommendations might
include (i) Organizing and Charging a Tiger Team to refine the
definition; (ii) Scheduling Stakeholder meetings; (iii) NOAA State of
the Science Fact Sheet on Climate Monitoring; (iv) Publish Climate
Monitoring definition and examples (e.g. NOAA webpage; AMS Bulletin,
etc.); (v) Education and Outreach activities to engage stakeholders.
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