HR: 09:15h
AN: ED31D-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Viewing Challenge as Opportunity: A Climate Diagnostics Center Perspective on Meeting the Needs of Audiences Outside of the Research Community
AU: * Collins, J A
EM: julia.collins@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, R/CDC1, Boulder, CO 80305-3328 United States
AU: Deluisi, B
EM: barb.deluisi@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, R/CDC1, Boulder, CO 80305-3328 United States
AU: Ray, A J
EM: andrea.ray@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center, 325 Broadway, R/CDC1, Boulder, CO 80305-3328 United States
AB: Although the day-to-day activities at the NOAA-CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) focus on the efforts of the scientific research community, our mission includes the charge to "develop new climate products that better serve the needs of the public and decision-makers." Meeting this goal involves not only developing these products, but also making the public and policy-makers aware of the resources and guiding them in the use of the climate products. Among the challenges involved in this "knowledge transfer" are the fact that we need to reach audiences which may not be accustomed to interpreting, evaluating, and using information at the same level as a member of the scientific research community. Additionally, these audiences may not have access to the information in any sort of built-in way, whereas the scientific research community by definition includes the interchange of ideas via journals, seminars, and regularly scheduled conferences. This presentation will focus on recent efforts at CDC to communicate with the public and policy-makers. In the first case, we focus on the results of taking the opportunity to discuss our work at an event open to the general public, in particular grade-school and middle-school aged children. At this event, our goal was to clearly illustrate the differences between "climate," "weather," "climate variability" and "climate change" in a very basic way. In the second case, we review the methods and status of a user study affiliated with the Western Water Assessment project. This study focuses on identifying the needs of users (in this case, the water provider/water management community). This example illustrates the importance of identifying the user needs and their current knowledge level, so that the appropriate climate products can then be supplied to the user community. Finally, we review the CDC web site content which has evolved specifically in response to feedback from non-research users, and discuss the challenges of, and strategies for, meeting those needs with limited staffing resources.
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
DE: 6600 PUBLIC ISSUES
DE: 6605 Education
DE: 6620 Science policy
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting