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Building Capacity for Coping with Weather and Climate HazardsDecision-makers both need to be aware of the threats and vulnerabilities inherent in environmental change and have the capability to respond to them. Capacity building is a long-term, on-going process in which scientific information can provide critical input to all stakeholders and increase the potential for successfully addressing change. SERE conducts focused activities through the CCB to develop increased capabilities to address various climate-related environmental changes, including desertification, coastal urban flooding and water resources. Operational goals and milestones can be used to measure the progress being made toward a level at which capacity can be said to have been "built" and becomes self-sustaining.
Climate Change, Seasonality, and Environmental Hazards [HIGHLIGHT] Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Strategic Initiative Weather and Climate Assessment Tools Institutional Aspects of Vulnerability and Adaptation
Climate Change, Seasonality & Environmental Hazards
CCB has studied early warning systems for many years, including systems used for droughts, El Niño, and famine, among others. Many international and national workshops have been held on this topic, often under the label of "usable science." Most recently, CCB involved universities and agencies from around the globe in workshops held in the Galapagos and Shanghai, China. In an expansion of the early warning notion, an international workshop was convened on "Climate Change, Seasonality, and Environmental Hazards in Southeast Asia." This workshop represents an attempt to bring an additional perspective to a larger overarching theme of CCB, which is to create awareness of the importance to governments and individuals of climate, water, and weather-related early warning systems. CCB researchers argue that awareness needs to be maintained in each of a system's stages, from monitoring indicators of change to the production and issuance of warnings. Held in March 2006 in Bangkok, Thailand, CCB organizers gathered participants from a wide range of backgrounds, including political science, chemistry, hydrology, atmospheric science, statistics, education, civil engineering, university administration, and science management. The full report of the workshop is available here (in PDF). The website for the entire workshop is available at www.ccb.ucar.edu/apn/. Rather than focus on just the causes for such shifts in hazard behavior or dwell only on the specific impacts on society, it is imperative to identify more specifically the chain of events from cause to ultimate impacts on humans, including responses to those impacts. The workshop highlighted "seasonality." Early warnings of changes in seasonality, whether qualitatively or quantitatively based, can elevate to prominence the key influence that subtle changes in the characteristic flow of the seasons can have on the behavior of living things on land and in the sea. At least a third of the world's population is very dependent on their expectations about the natural flow of the seasons. Any disruption of that expected flow causes hardships, such as impaired nutritional intake and associated potential increases in morbidity and mortality as a result of food insecurity. The region of "greater Southeast Asia" was chosen partly because of the wide range of climate-related hazards to which the governments and their citizens are affected. Participants expressed a belief that the seasons are not as predictable as they used to be in terms of temperature, precipitation, timing of the season's onset, and so forth. They also suggested that societies have become more dependent on the seasons, not less, despite technological attempts to buffer society from the vagaries of climate. This workshop was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Asia Pacific Network for Global Change Research, the UN University's International Network on Water, Environment, and Health (INWEH), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In FY2007, CCB will produce a book on early warning systems (currently being prepared in CCB) for distribution at the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) International Conference on "Secure and Sustainable Living: Social and Economic Benefits of Weather, Climate, and Water Services," to be held in Madrid, Spain, in March 2007. The National Science Foundation continues to fund this research through its support of the SERE Lab.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Initiative
The Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Initiative is an interdisciplinary effort that fosters collaborative science, spatial data interoperability, and knowledge sharing. The main objective of the GIS Initiative is to promote and support the use of GIS as both an analysis and an infrastructure tool in atmospheric research and to address broader issues of geoinformatics and spatial data management. The GIS Climate Change Scenarios project, conducted by the GIS Initiative in collaboration with the engineering team at NCAR's Community Data Portal, serves a community of GIS users interested in global climate change. This GIS data portal provides access to global data sets of climate change scenarios generated for the IPCC AR4 by the CCSM-3. The model outputs can be viewed on-line or downloaded in a GIS format, thus allowing for easy integration of climate predictions with environmental and socioeconomic datasets. To date, more than a thousand users from 88 countries have accessed the CCSM-3 climate predictions through the GIS data portal. Ongoing work is focusing on developing a statistical downscaling module for the GIS data portal to allow users to access downscaled CCSM projects for regional applications. Community-based or domain-specific data models are a critical component of peer-to-peer interoperability. Examples of such data models include Hydrological and Marine data models developed by hydrologic and oceanographic communities. Developing an atmospheric data model for ArcGIS, with the goal to facilitate extension of GIS capabilities for representing, querying and analyzing time-dependent, real-time, and volumetric data, has been a task of the Atmospheric Data Modeling working group, lead by NCAR's GIS Initiative in collaboration with colleagues from ESRI and George Mason University. In FY2006, the GIS Initiative conducted its third workshop on the Atmospheric Data Model development. In addition to development of the data model, the workshop participants addressed questions of representing time varying data in a data model, symbology and analysis tools. ESRI's desktop software, ArcGIS, will begin to read and write netCDF data natively in their next version of ArcGIS (to be released in the fall 2006). The GIS Initiative initiated a working dialog started between ESRI and UCAR in 2001 at the inception of the Initiative. Over the years, the GIS Initiative has remained the principal contact between the two organizations and has led the effort to bring Atmospheric science and GIS data/tools together. The primary achievement in this effort is that ESRI has agreed to bring netCDF data into their software natively. This achievement opens the door for many Earth System scientists to start using netCDF data in a GIS framework. This integration of atmospheric science and GIS data and analysis will greatly help to bring together physical, social and environmental sciences, which in the past has been a challenging process. From its inception, the GIS Initiative has identified two main approaches for NCAR's GIS infrastructure: 1) noncommercial OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) technologies and 2) commercial GIS technology developed by the ESRI. To promote deeper understanding of existing technologies and to advance GIS with respect to atmospheric science, in 2003 the NCAR GIS Initiative formed strategic partnerships with both ESRI and the OGC. Due to the level of expertise, GIS Initiative's collaborator, Unidata, took a leading role in taking the OGC approach forward. This participation included membership on OGC technical committee and conducting a GALEON (Geo-interface for Air, Land, Earth, Oceans NetCDF Interoperability Experiment) experiment under the auspices of the OGC. GALEON experiment conducted by Unidata and collaborators from 20 academic and commercial organizations focused on developing and employing standard, web-services based interfaces between data systems used by traditional GIS community and those in the "fluid Earth" community (mainly oceanographers and atmospheric scientists). Most of the activity of the GALEON first phase focused on testing and implementation between Web Coverage Service (WCS) clients and servers for netCDF datasets. The GALEON experiments have resulted in many recommendations to OGC interface specifications. The GIS Initiative is funded by the National Science Foundation.
Given sea level rise, warmer ocean temperatures, and an apparent increase in the magnitude of tropical storms, major urban centers are at risk to tropical storms and storm surges. During the past two years, we have witnessed not only single superstorms, but seasons of superstorms (2004-2005). Should we recognize the tropical cyclones of 2004 as heralds of more frequent, more intense, more costly, and more deadly cyclones on a warmer globe? Or do they reflect natural cycles? CCB's researchers are seeking to catalyze researchers and policy makers in urban coastal areas about the potential dangers associated with a varying and changing climate. NOAA requires a better understanding of the impacts of climate change and variability related to various sub-sectors, including coastal urban regions. Therefore, NOAA's new Sectoral Applications Research Program (SARP) and CCB have begun a collaboration to provide improved climate services to the nation. For the past few years, CCB has focused on the impacts of superstorms around the globe (hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones, dust storms). Michael Glantz and his staff will, during FY2007, develop a report for SARP on the current state of understanding related to climate issues in coastal regions, including the identification of gaps in this knowledge and potential program directions. Entitled "Megacities on the Coast," this report and annotated bibliography will include a comprehensive literature review and analysis. Two researchers will be hired during FY2007, one in the United States and another in Asia to compile the bibliography. CCB staff will then execute the review and analysis in order to assure the highest quality report is produced. This project will be concluded during FY2007 and is supported by the National Science Foundation and NOAA's Climate Program Office.
Weather and Climate Assessment Tools
Development of new methods and tools for climate and weather impacts assessment builds bridges between NCAR's geophysical sciences and impacts research, and facilitates dialogue between academics and practitioners. It also furthers NCAR's goal of providing services to the university community. Climate scenario development, statistical and GIS methods, and simulation tools — all are actively developed and deployed by ISSE's staff and collaborators. The major development during FY2006 has been the refinement of the statistical model used to develop probabilistic information about future regional climate (temperature and precipitation), and the development of software and a website to operationalize the model, so as to provide customized probabilistic information for different users across different regions. Users of these results to date have included the Aspen City Climate Change Project, the Department of Transportation Gulf States Study, and several water resources Agencies. Tebaldi and colleagues will further develop this Bayesian probabilistic model, so that temperature and precipitation change probabilities are jointly calculated, thus deriving bivariate probability distributions of climate change. The development of these joint distributions will facilitate the use of the probabilistic results in impacts models, which would require paired temperature and precipitation changes. The results of the bivariate model will also be made available via the website. Also, the website will be further developed to allow the user to select the desired region for calculation, and the results would automatically be produced and downloaded to the user (work by McGinnis and Tebaldi). Another major tool that has been developed and continues to be refined is the Extremes Toolkit (developed by Richard Katz and Eric Gilleland of RAL) which allows climatologists and other researchers to apply extreme value theory, including estimates of uncertainty to their studies of extreme events, without developing complex statistical code themselves. So far there have been over 150 registered users of the code. The Extremes Toolkit will be further developed to handle spatial fields of extreme values, and this will also be made available online. For other tools under development, please see the section on the GIS Initiative. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Institutional Aspects of Vulnerability and Adaptation
The world's tuna resources have come under increasing pressure in recent decades as a result of globalization, growing demand for fisheries products, rapidly expanding fishing fleets, and technical progress. The 1995 United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement provides for the strengthening of existing international fishery management organizations and the creation of new regional fishery management organizations (RFMOs) to govern harvests of straddling and highly migratory fish stocks. However, the ability of these organizations to prevent further degradation of the fish stocks (and associated socioeconomic damages) is not assured but will depend on how well they are able to enforce regulations and provide incentives to maintain cooperation in the face of the impacts of climate-driven environmental variability. This project focuses on understanding the interplay between climate-driven fish stock dynamics, competitive multinational harvesting, and governance effectiveness and seeks to provide insights on how to design governance regimes to promote sustainable and economically viable fisheries, despite the effects of climate variability. In FY2006, ISSE Scientist Kathleen Miller worked on a comparative analysis of the climate/fishery/management situation facing the new RFMOs governing the rapidly developing tropical tuna fisheries in the Western and Central Pacific and Indian Oceans . These two settings differ from one another in that the most productive fishing grounds in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean are comprised of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of the various island nations - with only small patches of international waters in which most of the tropical tuna harvest occurs. In the Western Indian Ocean there are large expanses of equatorial international waters, broken up by a handful of island nation EEZs. This physical and legal difference affects the extent to which the coastal/island nations are able to extract benefits from large-scale industrial distant water fishing nation (DWFN) harvests within their EEZs. Climate variability affects the abundance, spatial distribution, and catchability of the tropical tunas that fall within the purview of these RFMOs. These impacts are large enough to affect the location of DWFN harvesting efforts and payoffs to the various island and coastal nations whose exclusive EEZs comprise part of the productive tuna habitat. The potentially disruptive effects of these shifting opportunities has been partially addressed by the Western and Central Pacific Fishery Commission (WCPFC), but has not yet been effectively considered by the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC). In FY2007, in addition to continuing her work on assessment of the challenges posed by climate variability for RFMOs governing the world's tuna fisheries, Miller will continue working with Robert McKelvey (U Montana) and Peter Golubtsov (Moscow State Lomonosov U, Russia) on the development of game theoretic models appropriate to analysis of the effects of climate impacts in competitive fisheries for highly migratory fish stocks. She is also the lead scientist convening an international team of collaborators to attend a workshop during FY2007 at the University of California-Santa Barbara, on " The Challenge of Change: Managing for Sustainability of Oceanic Top Predator Species." It will contribute to ongoing efforts in developing the scientific basis for sustainable multilateral management of highly migratory marine species and will foster the development of a program of collaborative work focused on: 1) the role and significance of risk and uncertainty in the evolution and management of fisheries ; 2) the drivers of human impacts on these species; 3) the potential value of improved scientific information regarding the effects of climatic variability and harvesting activities on the productivity and spatial distribution of these stocks; and 4) the design of effective governance arrangements. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation.
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