Description:
NOAA climate data and forecast products respond to decision needs at national to local scales. Few products, however, convey both a view of the future and a picture of the past. Putting projections into the user’s context of institutional and operational memory allows them to better respond to changing climate conditions. One product that does so, the Local 3-Month Temperature Outlooks (L3MTO), introduced in 2007, facilitates decision-making at a local scale. The 2009 Customer Satisfaction Survey of NOAA NWS Climate Products indicated that 86% of respondents, after viewing L3MTO, wanted NOAA to issue a similar product for precipitation, a Local 3 Month Precipitation Outlooks (L3MPO). Since then the periodic customer satisfaction surveys indicated a need for L3MTO product improvements, especially critical for the way the information is communicated to the wide range of NOAA climate users.
This proposal would improve the L3MTO product, develop a L3MPO, and deliver decision support tools that include visualizations of the forecast products and concurrent past weather conditions. The benefit of this work will allow more users to better respond to changing climate conditions by putting the projected 3-month forecasts into context of past local climate conditions. The present users of national temperature and precipitation outlook products include agriculture, construction, energy, reclamation, recreation and tourism, retail, water resources and wild life management. Future use of L3MTO and L3MPO would expand beyond the technically-literate to many other sectors. Decision-makers, business and industry will benefit most by improved communication methods of this highly-technical forecast information.
