EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Environmental Assessment and Prediction Mission
Advance Short-Term Warning
Implement Seasonal to Interannual Climate Forecasts
Predict and Assess Decadal to Centennial Change
Promote Safe Navigation
Environmental Stewardship Mission
Crosscutting Initiatives
Reducing Costs and Improving Effectiveness
Budget Request--
Traditional Structure
Budget Request--
Strategic Plan Structure
Supplementary Tables
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Implement Seasonal to Interannual Climate Forecasts
Total Request: $105,424,000
NOAA requests $105.4 million to address this strategic goal, a net increase
of $1.6 million from the FY 1999 base. The objectives are to:
- deliver useful seasonal to interannual climate forecasts and information;
- enhance observing and data systems providing input to model predictions;
- invest in process and modeling research leading to improved predictions
of temperature and rainfall; and
- assess the impacts of climate variability on human activity and economic
potential.
These objectives will be accomplished primarily through the efforts of
the NOAA Climate and Global Change (C & GC) Program, the OAR Environmental
Research Laboratories (ERLs), NESDIS, and the NWS National Centers for Environmental
Prediction.
Emerging capabilities to forecast climate are the result of federal investments
in basic research, development and deployment of global observing and data
systems, and transition of research findings to operational needs. Climate
services will be as important to 21st-century economies and societies as
weather forecasting is today, and the future capacity to deliver uniform
climate information will continue to depend strongly on federal support
for process and modeling research, and for the collection of global data
needed to initialize and validate climate models. NOAA requests an increase
of $2.0 million to augment the current efforts to develop regionally specific
seasonal-to-interannual climate models for North America.
Also included is a net decrease of $0.4 million for program reductions,
terminations and distributed infrastructure changes.
Interannual climate variability, particularly El Niño, causes
temperature and precipitation to deviate from their average levels. This
affects the prices of climate-sensitive goods and services (ranging from
crops to heating oil), by changing their supply and demand.
For example, El Niño has lowered the wheat yield by 16 percent in
Japan and increased it by 12 percent in North Africa. Society benefits from
improved climatic forecasts, which permit
farmers and others to make decisions that capitalize on the predicted deviations
from normal climatic conditions.
In the United States, better climate forecasting can result in annual
benefits of more than $300 million annually from improved cropping decisions.
Further, improved seasonal forecasts can reduce storage costs of important
agricultural commodities. It is estimated that reduced storage costs for
corn alone in the U.S. can be as high as $400 million annually. Global benefits
could be substantially higher. |