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"Promote societal welfare by conducting interdisciplinary research on the interactions between society and weather and climate in order to increase societal resilience to the associated risks and to support decision making."

Motivation

Human activities have long played a complex role in the interaction between the atmosphere and the environment, resulting in unprecedented weather and climate changes. The significance of that role was detailed in the Fourth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year, as was the need for far more effective adaptation strategies than currently exist. The report went on to explain that barriers, limits and costs which are not fully understood will make it difficult to devise and implement those much-needed adaptation strategies. NCAR scientists played important roles in coordinating and writing this Nobel prizewinning report and stand ready, in collaboration with colleagues from the broader research community, to address a number of needs identified in the report.

Human society is increasingly vulnerable, not only to changing climate, but also to increasingly erratic, and often extreme, atmospheric phenomena such as hurricanes, floods, and drought. Improved weather forecasts may well reduce societal vulnerability if that information is presented to decision makers in ways they understand, value, and can use.

In both the climate and weather arenas, we will work across physical and social science disciplines to bring research at the society–environment-atmosphere interface to bear on critical societal decision–making processes, helping to ensure an economically prosperous and environmentally sustainable future.

Near-Term Objectives

Strategies for Regional Adaptation to Climate Change (2009–2013)

As the reality of human–induced climate change is increasingly accepted by policymakers and the public at large, the demand for regional–scale information about observed and projected changes and impacts is increasing rapidly. Many decisions about mitigation and, especially, adaptation, will be made at individual, local, and regional levels. Effective decision–making about adaptation will require accurate and usable information about regional scale climate change and the relationships among climate change and other important environmental stressors, including land use change, invasive species, "conventional" pollution, and market forces. Creation and provision of such information is dependent on improvements in climate models, frameworks, and tools for assessing adaptive capacity, as well as on integrated interdisciplinary research efforts that draw on and join climate science, ecology, sociology, economics, and other social and environmental sciences, along with fields such as statistics. The development of science–based planning tools that are responsive to the specific needs of decision–makers are also essential.

Actions:

• Evaluate and compare results from leading global and regional climate models, and create and distribute high–resolution, multi–model, GIS–compatible scenarios of future climate change in the U.S.
• Investigate, assess, and document the spatially explicit determinants of social and ecological vulnerabilities to, and impacts of, both current climate variability and projected climate change. Vulnerabilities are a function of exposure (e.g., to heat waves, changing precipitation, altered atmospheric chemistry) and sensitivity, as affected by other key stresses (e.g., land use change, increasing population). This work will be focused on health, and water availability and quality in urban, terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
• Develop and apply tools and methods for analyzing changes in the probability of climate extremes (e.g., heat waves), characterizing observational, model, and vulnerability–assessment uncertainties, and integrating climate change information with planning tools used for urban and water resource management.

Targeted Sponsors: NSF, DOE, EPA, international development agencies (World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, etc).

Anticipated Collaborators: CGD, TIIMES, IMAGe, NOAA RISA Centers.

Specific Measurements of Success: Collaborative development, implementation and publication in refereed journals of new diagnostics and models (STIRTAP, ADAPTE) that cross traditional NCAR physical/social science boundaries incorporating new data sources such as ground observations or satellites. Development of methods for incorporating information on uncertainty into assessments of regional impacts and evaluation of adaptation strategies, and publication of journal articles describing and using these methods. Development of methods for evaluating cross–sector interactions among potential adaptation activities, quantification of such cross–effects, and publication of this research in journal articles.

Use and Value of Weather Information (2009–2013)

The ultimate goal of weather forecasting is to create societal value by providing usable information for decision–making. For information to be usable, it needs to be scientifically sound, communicated effectively, interpretable, and actionable. Yet despite steady improvement in weather observing systems and forecast model capabilities, the U.S. and other nations remain quite vulnerable to severe weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, floods, and droughts (the U.S. experienced $17B a year on average in weather–related losses over the last 50 years). Why are impacts increasing in the face of observational and modeling improvements? Hurricane Katrina provides a key example. Katrina forecasts were quite accurate, yet many people did not evacuate and either died or suffered significantly. Better forecast communication and decision making wouldn't have eliminated most of the damage, but it may have saved lives and misery. Lack of research at the weather–society interface – research that is needed to help address the question posed above – has been identified as a major gap in NRC reports and other community documents. There is insufficient empirical knowledge about how diverse actors in the forecast system communicate, interpret, and use currently available weather forecast information, much less new or improved information. Such knowledge is especially lacking for forecast information that conveys uncertainty. The social sciences offer comprehensive theories and research methods that, when integrated with meteorology, can build this critical knowledge.

Actions:

• Develop a monetary estimate of the hurricane forecast improvements proposed under the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP) by applying non-market valuation methods to study households' values for improved hurricane forecasts.
• Metric: Development of a monetary estimate of the hurricane forecast improvements proposed under the Project HFIP and communication of results through reports and publications.
• Provide guidance to the NWS Performance Branch on improving storm loss information in the Storm Data database based on a comprehensive survey of each Weather Forecast Office's (WFO) methods.
• Metric: Report for NWS Performance Branch providing recommendations for improving storm loss information, grounded in empirical findings from the WFO survey.
• Identify and fill gaps in how hurricane and flash flood forecast information is created, interpreted, and used in decision making by eliciting mental models through interviews with forecasters, media, public officials, and members of the public and through a household survey.
• Metric: Collaborative publications and stakeholder workshop reporting findings on mental models and associated gaps in interpretation and use of hurricane and flash flood forecast information (in Miami and Boulder, respectively).
• Improve the communication of hurricane warnings by characterizing communication channels and message content and investigating how at–risk populations comprehend and react to warnings through structured observation and interviews, focus groups, and a household survey.

Targeted Sponsors: NSF, NOAA.

Anticipated Collaborators: Florida International University, Univ. of Colorado, Univ. of New Mexico, NWS, and Univ. of Oklahoma.

Specific Measurements of Success: Publication of the results of these studies in refereed domain journals such as Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, Monthly Weather Review, and Weather and Forecasting. Presentation of results at the annual AMS meetings. Presenting seminars at the stakeholder institutions with executive summaries and full documents sent to stakeholder leadership and line offices. Communication of findings to the hurricane research, forecasting, broadcast, and emergency management communities. Securing follow–on funding to support this work in the out years. Other metrics identified above.

Frontiers

New Quantitative Models that Integrate Socioeconomic and Biophysical Components of Climate Change (2009–2013)

The environment for climate change science has begun to shift in the wake of the IPCC AR4. Decision–makers at all levels are increasingly concerned with questions about how climate change will affect particular places and how humanity can most effectively respond. Our view is that ISSE's efforts on regional assessment should be supplemented by research within a global framework on the potential effectiveness of mitigation and adaptation strategies, and we see integrated assessment (IA) modeling as an ideal tool for this task. IA modeling integrates knowledge across a wide variety of disciplines in a framework for decision analyses and fits naturally within NCAR as a complement to larger–scale modeling efforts in other divisions. Its focus on emissions, impacts, and policy responses can directly link to Earth System Models by providing inputs and/or using outputs, and can also indirectly inform ESM efforts by prioritizing research directions and identifying interesting scenarios to explore. ISSE scientists, along with outside collaborators, have created and begun to use an initial version of an NCAR IA model, the Integrated–Population–Economy–Technology-Science (iPETS) model.

Ultimately, we envision building iPETS up into a full–fledged NCAR community model, with robust user support and ongoing co–development with users, whose code and results would be fully and openly available to all interested parties. This program, along with several similar efforts being planned at other universities and laboratories, will provide a new generation of IA models to support scientific investigation of the implications of climate change in concert with other environmental stresses and policy–relevant analysis and evaluation of options for responding to change.

Actions:

• Submit a series of papers documenting the iPETS model and its initial application to global energy, land use, and emissions scenarios, and make Version One of iPETS available over the Web to interested collaborators and users.
• Address a series of targeted policy–relevant questions involving linkages among climate change outcomes, impacts, and mitigation/adaptation responses, such as the risks and benefits of overshoot scenarios, the use of mid–century goals as guides to policy, and the role of land use in mitigation and impacts assessment.
• Use iPETS to develop and test new approaches to accounting for uncertainty and learning in integrated assessment modeling.
• Draw on regional–scale research on water and urban systems to improve the representation of impacts and adaptation options in integrated assessment models, including iPETS, the MIT IGSM, and other integrated assessment models. In turn, develop a version of iPETS that can better inform regional–scale analysis of impacts and adaptation and provide more information on aspects of human well–being such as poverty, education, and health.
• Work with software engineers, computational scientists, and applied mathematicians in CISL and the IA community to develop subsequent versions of iPETS that are more flexible, computationally efficient, and accessible to users, and that include more sophisticated representation of Earth and socio–economic systems, resulting in an "IA model of intermediate complexity (IMIC)."
• To achieve these goals more effectively, facilitate deeper interactions on IA modeling between ISSE, CGD, and other parts of NCAR, and between NCAR and the broader IA community, including the new Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium and individual efforts at MIT, University of Maryland, IIASA, Tyndall Centre, and others.

Targeted Sponsors: NSF, DOE, Energy Corporations. Other sponsorship to be developed.

Anticipated Collaborators: Other groups at NCAR, new cooperation with IA–oriented researchers at universities and other research laboratories. Stakeholders and decision makers to be identified.

Specific Measurements of Success:

Short term (2-3 years):

• Document iPETS and initial application in a refereed journal and present these results at DOE, NSF, and IA community meetings; launch web-accessible version of iPETS.
• Publish several journal papers on applications of iPETS to policy-relevant questions and uncertainty topics listed above, including collaborative publications involving other parts of NCAR and university collaborators.
• Become a full participant in (and lead aspects of) IA community research efforts such as the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium and the Energy Modeling Forum.
• Establish feasibility and desirability of integrating iPETS with CCSM.

Medium term (3-5 years):

• Secure substantial additional external funding to support IA modeling efforts.
• Successful implementation of impacts and adaptation at regional level within integrated assessment models.
• Develop and release the more sophisticated (IMIC) version of iPETS as a community model.
• Carry out integrated iPETS-CCSM simulation.