Archive of Spotlight Feature Articles

Decision Support Research:
Bridging Science and Service

Climate and Societal Interactions Division, OGP
The Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) Program

NOAA Research has been investing in decision support research for over a decade through its Climate and Societal Interactions (CSI) Program. One of the most important insights from this CSI- sponsored research in Human Dimensions and applications research was that the research community needed to go beyond the study of climate impacts and focus on understanding the decision processes and specific information needs of stakeholders to advance the utility of climate information. In order to understand stakeholder needs and perspectives, stakeholders would need to become partners in the research enterprise. Ultimately, success in both sharpening research objectives and increasing regional adaptive capacity would be supported through sustained relationships in an integrated assessment process.

In the RISA context, integrated scientific assessments constitute the sum of efforts to (1) characterize the state of knowledge of climate variations and changes at appropriate scales of interest, (2) identify knowledge gaps and linkages in selected climate-environment-society interactions, and (3) provide an informed basis for (a) responding to climate-related risks, and for (b) establishing priorities in basic research investments to meet these needs.

The “regional scale” offers a useful organizational unit on which to coordinate and evaluate socially relevant research in ways particularly relevant to state and local decision makers. Understanding the potential value of place based research, the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program began in 1996 with a visionary mission to support regional climate science research focused on informing itself, systematically, about the climate information needs of decision makers. Through a process of interaction with key regional stakeholders, multi-disciplinary groups of university-based researchers identify a limited number of tractable climate sensitive issues with relevance to a variety of policy and natural resource management areas. Examples of decision and policy makers include state and federal agencies, public health agencies, municipalities and regional natural resource management agencies, agricultural managers, fishermen and fisheries managers, extension agents, water resource managers, forest resource managers, and environmental regulators.

The RISA Program currently includes six teams across the continental United States, and with some new funding for FY03, may expand in one or two new regions. The RISA Program is dedicated to a productive blending of curiosity-inspired and “user-inspired” priorities. Collaborations with state and federal agencies tasked with specific resource management mandates are common, as is the case with the National Park Service’s goal of utilizing protected, multi-use areas as natural laboratories in global change research. In some cases, RISAs provide valuable science input to unique Federal and State ecosystem restoration programs, as well as moving science forward on identifying potential impacts of long term global change.

The value of new decision support tools coming out of RISA research is evident in the number of cases where policy and operations have been influenced, and where institutions or agencies initiate or enhance their participation in RISA activities. Findings from RISA activities are often so valuable to the community that tools and procedures are developed before a formal report has been written and published. Examples include the creation and use of a decision calendar that serves to integrate the timing of decision need with the production of seasonal climate information products over the course of a calendar year, or nesting an ongoing modeling activity within an operational decision setting, such as the work currently underway in a national map for fire risk and management.

Further examples of research-based products include:

• Snow-water equivalent forecasts for the San Francisco Bay Delta Watershed
• Integrated climate-ecology-land management model for fire managers
• Long-lead streamflow forecasts for water resource planning in the Columbia River
• Integrated sea-level, sea surface temperature, and near shore winds information for forecasts of salmon returns
• National fire outlook map (see reference at bottom of page)
• Climate forecast tutorials and evaluation tools
• Forecasts of commodity yields based on climate forecasts, updated monthly
• University curricula for multi-disciplinary study of climate impacts and policy response

Meeting the climate information needs of decision-makers is a major challenge facing NOAA as it builds the nation’s climate service. The important impacts of both natural and anthropogenic climate variability and change are, and will be, manifest as the regional impacts of climate variability. In addition to mastering our ability to observe, understand and simulate global- to continental-scale processes, the ultimate utility of this work hinges on making the connection between regional variability and humans or ecosystems. The scientific community will be pressed, as never before, to generate increasingly useful climate knowledge, particularly at local regional scales that are not well understood. Place-based programs, such as RISA, will continue to look to studies of the application of climate information and rely on human dimensions research to strengthen the theoretical foundations behind decision support. Although this is a difficult objective, on-going integrated regional climate science and assessment efforts are demonstrating that it is possible and the returns to our scientific enterprise and our ability to cope with climate will be substantial.

For information about RISA, please contact Harvey Hill at 301-427-2089 ext. 197 or harvey.hill@noaa.gov.

Watch a streaming video of the 2003 RISA National Program Meeting to hear researchers describe their vision for multidisciplinary integrated climate research and applications for decision-making.

Visit the following websites to learn more about the substantive issues being addressed by current Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments projects.

California
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/cap/danwx.html

Colorado
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/wwa/

New England
http://airmap.unh.edu/assessment/index.cfm

Pacific Northwest
http://jisao.washington.edu/PNWimpacts/

South East Consortium
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/lib/Florida_Consortium/

Southwest
http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/climas/

Reference for National Fire Outlook Map

CLIMAS
Gregg Garfin (contact)
Barbara Morehouse

NICC
Thomas Wordell (contact)
Rick Ochoa Heath Hockenberry

CEFA
Tim Brown (contact)
Climate Forecasters
Anthony Barnston (IRI)
Russell Martin (NOAA-CPC)
John Roads (Scripps)
Klaus Wolter (NOAA-CDC)

[4/21/03]

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