NOAA Climate Program Office

This study will provide an in-depth investigation of the survey results on how communities plan and govern extreme heat risk. The case study methods include semi-structured interviews with decision-makers and content analysis of plans for heat management and mitigation strategies. It builds upon the work started with the CLIMAS Urban Heat Island Mapping project that assessed the use of UHI maps and decision-making in the Southwest, a literature review on planning for extreme heat, and the survey of U.S. planners on extreme heat. To document the current state of emergent extreme heat governance in the U.S., five case study communities were selected, including Tucson, AZ; Houston, TX; Baltimore, MD; Detroit, MI; and Seattle, WA. These communities represent five National Climate Assessment regions, and four of the communities have participated in the NIHHIS-CAPA Heat Mapping Campaign.

The Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand Study, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, was an unprecedented attempt to bring together a variety of experts and stakeholders from the watershed to address the current imbalance between supply and demand from 2012 through 2060. The study is also the largest scenario-planning project ever to be conducted by the Bureau of Reclamation. While most scenarios are either an expert scenario model or a stakeholder-defined scenario, the study incorporated aspects from both models, creating a collaborative model. Researchers hypothesize that this collaborative scenario planning process makes it easier for stakeholders to find common ground on pathways to address common challenges, and that it fosters the use of climate change information in decision making. This project aims to evaluate the aforementioned hypotheses through critical evaluation of the basin study scenario planning activity and basin study participant responses to interview questions.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) plays a critical role in helping land, water, and coastal managers prepare for and respond to diverse weather and climate-driven extreme events. Challenges to accessing, interpreting, and disseminating diverse climate and weather (C&W) information, however, limit FEMA’s use of this information, which can impede pre-positioning resources in high-risk areas, delay advanced warnings, and spur misunderstanding. Strategic partnerships that link information producers and consumers and provide opportunities for co-developing useful C&W information can help agencies like FEMA better fulfill their mandate to safeguard life and property. This project examines the process of developing strategic partnerships, communication strategies, and relevant C&W information to support FEMA’s hazards monitoring efforts in Arizona, Nevada, and California. This study examines the end-to-end process of decision support and will be conducted within a framework advocated by the National Research Council. This incudes: assessing FEMA’s C&W information needs and gaps; coproducing a decision-support tool; and measuring impacts, successes, and limitations of the decision-support tool, engagement process, and partnership. The objectives are to better understand how to provide climate services and develop strategies that seamlessly transition from research to operations, while assessing the role of ‘boundary organizations’ (e.g., RISAs) in developing and mediating partnerships that advance climate services and long-term adaptation efforts.

The decision support tool developed through this project is a climate dashboard. It presents historical hydroclimate risk, current climate conditions, and information about future climate. http://www.climas.arizona.edu/content/fema-dashboard-2

Climate in Context is an edited volume describing the development and implementation of the NOAA RISA program, an innovative program to research and develop experimental region-based climate services. The book covers scholarly contributions on use-inspired research in five key areas, including understanding the context of working with stakeholders and decision makers, understanding risk-based climate applications, supporting the development of knowledge networks, innovating regional climate services, and advancing science policy. The book editors are Adam Parris, Gregg Garfin, Kirstin Dow, Ryan Meyer, and Sarah Close. The book will be published by Wiley & Sons and the expected date of publication is January 2016.

Beginning with a seminal workshop in 2000, organized by CLIMAS and University of Arizona scientists, CLIMAS has been a leader in the process of bridging the worlds of fire managers and climate researchers. The initial workshop in 2000 spawned two workshops in 2001: Fire and Climate in the Southwest and Fire and Climate 2001 in the West. The success of these meetings led to the 2002 Fire in the West workshop. These annual workshops brought fire managers, applied fire researchers, and climate forecasters together to exchange information and ideas. This process has evolved into a partnership to evaluate the potential for significant wildland fire activity, which became institutionalized in the form of the National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (2003-2012), and fully operationalized by the National Interagency Coordination Center.

The National Seasonal Assessment Workshops (NSAW) were developed by a partnership between CLIMAS, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services (NICC), and the Program for Climate, Ecosystem and Fire Applications (CEFA) at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada. The impetus for the partnership and associated workshops is to improve information available to fire management decision makers for allocation of firefighting resources at local, regional, and national scales. The collaboration is grounded in a commitment to sustained interaction between partnering institutions, equality in partnership, and clear partnership responsibilities.

In collaboration with 11 Geographic Area Coordination Centers (GACCs), NOAA Climate Prediction Center, California Applications Program RISA, Western Water Assessment RISA, Southeast Climate Consortium RISA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Experimental Climate Prediction Center, and others, the NSAWs brought together fire meteorologists, fire behavior analysts, fuel specialists, fire managers, climate forecasters, and climate researchers for a focused exchange of ideas and work sessions. The workshop participants produced pre-season fire potential outlooks for the eastern half of the U.S. (in January each year), and the western half of the U.S. plus Alaska (in late March or early April each year).

In 2007, the National Interagency Coordination Center’s Predictive Services began to operationalize national monthly and seasonal outlooks, on an experimental basis. Since then, these “monthly-seasonal outlooks” are produced by NICC, with input from partners in the applied climate forecasting and fire management and research communities. CLIMAS continues to be involved with fire prediction efforts, primarily through the work of CLIMAS affiliate, Tim Brown and through the North American Climate Services Partnership.

This project connects two RISA programs, the Western Water Assessment (WWA) and CLIMAS with regional conservation planners and decision makers to improve climate adaptation planning and implementation by land managers in the American Southwest. A key challenge is to bring climate knowledge to bear on habitat and species conservation efforts underway in the region, and to move conservation projects beyond vulnerability assessments to adaptation planning and implementation. This project is intended to advance four goals: expand translational science capacity in the region to support adaptation; improve regional climate-sensitive conservation decision making; disseminate climate knowledge through conservation networks in the region; and develop both a comprehensive evaluation of the project and a training curriculum for future personnel intending to engage in this type of work. The project will prototype and develop a model for expanding the translational climate science capacity needed to move ecosystem management beyond vulnerability assessments and into on-the-ground decision making for adaptation to climate variability and change.