HR: 0800h
AN: A41A-07    [Abstracts]
TI: Overview of the North America Climate Extremes Monitoring (NACEM) System
AU: * Lawrimore, J H
EM: jay.lawrimore@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AU: Heim, R R
EM: richard.heim@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AB: The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and other climate assessments have documented an increasing trend in temperature and precipitation extremes, including hot days and nights, heavy precipitation events, and area affected by droughts. Extreme weather and climate events such as these often result in significant socioeconomic and environmental costs within affected areas. This reality along with the likelihood that trends toward more frequent and intense extreme events will increase in a warming world has focused attention on programs that can provide information to decision makers responsible for planning, response, and mitigation activities. Several government and university institutions throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico have partnered to improve monitoring of extremes across the North American Continent. This effort began in late 2002 with establishment of the North America Drought Monitor (NADM), an operational program for monitoring continent-scale drought conditions on an ongoing basis. Following the NADM, this trilateral partnership initiated development of a web- based climate extremes system to expand the capacity to monitor a wider range of climate extremes. Using daily data from stations across these three countries, the North American Climate Extremes Monitoring (NACEM) system now provides decision makers with the ability to monitor and analyze climate extremes on the continent. The U.S. and Canada are also collaborating in the creation of a near-real time operational component to monitor the occurrence of new daily, monthly, and all-time records for temperature, precipitation, and snowfall as they occur. Parallel development of a North American gridded database of daily temperature and precipitation supports these activities and will soon provide for the analysis of extremes on a regional, country, and continental-scale basis. This presentation will include an overview of the NACEM system and its products, the supporting database, observed changes in climate extremes, and future plans for the system.
DE: 1605 Abrupt/rapid climate change (4901, 8408)
DE: 1812 Drought
DE: 1817 Extreme events
DE: 3305 Climate change and variability (1616, 1635, 3309, 4215, 4513)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly