NOAA's Climate Service: Obama's New Federal Climate Change Agency

This past week the Obama administration announced a new federal agency to monitor global climate change under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Labeled NOAA's Climate Services, the proposed entity would provide "user-friendly" information to help governments and businesses adapt to climate change, creating a central federal source of information on everything from projections of sea level rise to maps of the nation's best sites for wind and solar power.

While most people notice the weather from day to day or week to week, climate looks at both the averages and extremes of weather over longer periods of time. And understanding both weather and climate, and their changes, are vital to much of the world's economic activity ranging from farming to travel to energy use and production and even food shipments and disease prevention.

"Even with our best efforts, we know that some degree of climate change is inevitable," said Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, whose department includes NOAA. "American citizens, businesses and governments -- from local to federal -- must be able to rise to the challenges that lie ahead. And that's where NOAA's climate service will prove absolutely invaluable."

Just as NOAA's National Weather Service provides information on short-range environmental conditions, the proposed climate service will provide long-term projections of how climate will change.

Already a prototype Web portal for scientific climate data has been launched at www.climate.gov, a one-stop source of data and services for policy-makers, scientists, educators, businesses and the public. The website would serve as the public outlet for the proposed NOAA Climate Service, a new line office within the Commerce Department that would supply a growing demand for research and data on climate change.

“If we are able to form the new line office, the portal will be one of the channels for providing information to the public,” said David Herring, communications director for the NOAA Climate Program Office.