Executive Summary

Weather and climate impact our economy, safety, environment, and national security, through both everyday fluctuations and extreme events (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, etc.). We are also deeply affected by longer-term weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña, which exist for an entire season or more. The impacts of weather and climate on everyday life are increasing, and they are being felt in may ways: unprecedented mass evacuations in the face of hurricanes, increased flight delays, wildly fluctuating energy costs and services, and prolonged air pollution episodes and water shortages. Each year, the aggregate toll amounts to thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in property loss and business disruption.

Conversely, good weather and climate information and the associated services can be used to ensure a safer public, an expanding economy, a healthier environment, and a greater measure of national security. Better weather and climate services should be of interest to all our citizens. For example, at $1 million per mile of coast evacuated, a 20% improvement in predictions of hurricane landfall, track, and intensity could save $80 million per storm, or roughly $500 million annually. A single local utility company can save millions of dollars by optimizing energy production during a balmy winter day (or lose millions by not doing so). Weather and climate services require a unique national and international partnership among public and private enterprise, academia, and the media to produce observations and forecasts, distribute this information in specialized ways, develop new capabilities and technologies, and train the next generation of researchers and forecasters.

Despite great improvements in weather and climate services, public and commercial providers are failing to keep pace with growing national needs. To ensure that essential weather and climate services meet future requirements, the incoming administration should work with the Congress on initiatives in five areas:

Infrastructure Investment. Accelerate the current rate of investment in infrastucture for vital weather and climate monitoring and prediction; Research Investment. Augment weather and climate R&D and facilitate more rapid transfer into products and services;

Policy. Examine policies that affect weather and climate services and strengthen international commitments to free and open exchange of meteorological data;

Education. Increase the emphasis on meterological education in public schools; and

Commission. Establish a National Commission on the Atmosphere to provide the new administration and Congress with advice on these matters and explore how our nation's weather and climate services can be optimally deployed.

America's Dependence on Weather and Climate Services is Deepening

At the very time weather and climate services are growing more capable—more timely, specific, and accurate—and more central to the national agenda, the gap between capabilities and needs is widening. For example:

Public Safety. An expanding, increasingly urbanized population demands longer advance warning of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, winter storms, hail, heat waves, wildfires, and other natural hazards. A health- conscious society is concerned about weather and climate influences on air quality, allergens, and the spread of pests and infectious diseases, and seeks greater protection from all these threats. A highly mobile society requires tailored weather information to ensure safety in the air, on road and rail, and at sea. Modern life styles have intensified individual and family reliance on weather predictions out to several days to support varied work, recreation, and travel routines. In the United States, we sustain $16 billion in weather-related damages annually, with major losses in nearly every state.1 A single catastrophic event can be even more devastating: for example, Hurricane Andrew caused $25 billion in damage in 1992.2

Economy. The potential threat of weather and climate disruptions to our economy is significant; both the Federal government3 and the private sector4 estimate that over $2 trillion, some 25% of the U.S. gross national product, is affected by weather and climate. A highly technological, export-oriented agricultural sector needs more timely, specific weather forecasts and seasonal outlooks across the United States and globally. An energy sector struggling simultaneously with rapid growth, tightening environmental constraints, and deregulation must more effectively anticipate weather and climate variability over periods of days to years in order to budget resources accurately. (Any single event can confer both costs and benefits. For example, the El Niño of 1997–98 caused over $4 billion in property and agricultural losses, while at the same time it saved $19 billion in reduced heating costs, fewer construction and transportation delays, and the like.5 Better predictions would help these sectors reduce the costs while preserving or enhancing the benefits.) The retail sector increasingly tailors its merchandising for clothing, food, and household goods based on seasonal weather outlooks. The Inter-net, changing life styles, and longer-term weather forecasts are allowing consumers to adjust their recreation and vacation plans to capture favorable weather, thus changing the face of this $50- billion-a-year industry. The transportation sector needs improved weather information to make the most efficient use of the nation's infrastructure of airports, highways, rail, and ports—streamlining everything from commerce to the daily commute. Flight delays alone cost the public roughly $1 billion each year.6

Environment. Federal and state agencies need new, site-specific fire-weather services to deal with interventions from wildfire suppression to prescribed burns. A nation reluctant to build new dams, and actively removing existing ones, is increasingly dependent on forecasts to help manage critical water resources. Government and business leaders need long-term climate projections and advanced scientific understanding to formulate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

National Security. Today's sophisticated military requires meteorological support for routine operations at bases worldwide and for specialized operations on land and sea, from the Arctic to the Middle East, Central Europe, and Asia, especially during hostilities. Countering terrorism requires tracking the spread of deadly chemical and biological agents through forecasts of atmospheric transport and diffusion on local, regional, and global scales. Worldwide, weather disasters are destabilizing, touching the lives of some 28 million people a year.7 Even single events, such as Hurricane Mitch (1998) or floods in Mozambique (2000), can destroy regional economies and trigger mass migrations.

Current Challenges

Weather and climate services face daunting problems:
• Despite repeated modernizations over its 130-year lifetime, the weather observation network is aging and incomplete. We have inadequate observations of meteorological conditions over the oceans, poor estimates of atmospheric moisture fields, and no measures of many fine-scale atmospheric features. While technology exists to fill these gaps (new satellite instruments and platforms, radar and information system upgrades, surface profilers, and ground- and space-based GPS observational technologies) there are inadequate funds for implementation.

• Anticipating climate variations requires intensive monitoring of the earth's oceans and land: to measure soil moisture, vegetation, stream flows, chemical processes, ocean temperature and salinity, etc. These monitoring networks are in urgent need of refurbishing and augmentation.

• U.S. government and university centers for numerical prediction and research have fallen behind centers abroad (such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts), as a result of staff attrition and slow acquisition of computing resources. Computer resources are inadequate to run models at needed resolutions, to incorporate observations from varied sources effectively, and to produce the forecast ensembles needed to reduce uncertainty.

Recommended Actions

To overcome these shortcomings and provide essential weather and climate services in future years, the incoming administration should work with the Congress to take the following immediate steps:
1. Infrastructure Investment. Accelerate the current rate of investment in infrastructure for vital weather and climate monitoring and prediction. This investment is needed both to fully exploit new technologies and to correct years of budget attrition. Additional funds would pay for developing and launching new meteorological satellite instruments and platforms, refurbishing the national radar network, rebuilding forecast and research centers, and communicating and disseminating data and products to the general public and the private sector.

2. Research Investment. Augment weather and climate R&D and facilitate more rapid transfer into products and services. The present rate of advance in R&D is inadequate, and developments need to be incorporated more rapidly into services. Although forecast skill by various measures has been improving (by a few percent per year), with resultant economic benefits, the fast pace of population growth and increasing economic vulnerability have outstripped these modest gains. As a result, weather and climate losses continue to rise disproportionately. Currently, there aren't enough funds, equipment, or people to pursue many promising avenues of improvement. This problem is by no means unique to the atmospheric sciences. Bipartisan plans to double the national investment in R&D over the next five years should explicitly include support for weather and climate research currently conducted in NSF, NASA, NOAA, DOE, and DOD.

3. Policy. Examine policies that affect weather and climate services and strengthen the international commitment to free and open exchange of meteorological data. Policies must be examined to ensure that U.S. agencies' activities are fully coordinated and that the United States works closely with other nations to optimize international investment in weather and climate services. Of special concern is the commitment to free and open exchange of meteorological data internationally. In recent years, this vital historical commitment has been compromised by differing national approaches to internal public-private partnerships. Significant voids in data from any one country quickly compromise forecast skill for all the rest.

4. Education. Increase the emphasis on meteorological education in public schools. Americans are captivated by news of weather and climate. The fortunes of local newscasts often hinge on the quality of their weather broadcasts; viewers rely on up-to-the- minute reports of extreme weather activity nationwide. Currently, however, we are failing to capitalize on this interest. By placing more emphasis on weather and climate curricula, educational institutions at all levels could harness such enthusiasm—strengthening the national debate on atmospheric policy issues and maintaining the ranks of meteorological professionals. Meteorology's natural appeal might also promote interest in science and engineering more broadly among young people.

5. Commission. Establish a National Commission on the Atmosphere. Weather and climate services need significant coordination—among nations, between government agencies, and with private enterprise and academia. Such coordination requires high-level, sustained leadership. The incoming administration should establish a National Commission on the Atmosphere to provide ongoing advice to the executive branch and the Congress on how best to achieve the goals mentioned. The commission should encompass all stakeholders—government, end users, commercial service providers, the university community, the media, and relevant nongovernmental organizations.

   America's fortunes—our safety and security, our economy, and our ecosystems and environment—are weather and climate sensitive to a significant degree. Though we face a daunting array of hazards and are affected by weather and climate in myriad, complex ways, we have unprecedented technological means for coping with future events, provided we are guided by accurate and timely forecasts. By making needed investments in the atmospheric enterprise we can ensure our prosperity for years to come.

• Pielke, R.A., Jr., et al., Workshop on the Social and Economic Impacts of Weather, April 2-4, 1997. Available (24 Jan. 2001).

• Herbert, P., et al., "The Deadliest, Costliest, and Most Intense United States Hurricanes of This Century," NOAA Technical Memorandum NWS TPC-1. Miami, Florida: National Hurricane Center, 1996.

• National Research Council, The Atmospheric Sciences: Entering the Twenty-First Century, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998. Preface, Contents, and Summary available on the Web (24 Jan. 2001).

• Chicago Mercantile Exchange, News Release, August 23, 1999. Available on the Web.

• Changnon, S.A., "Impacts of 1997–98 El Niño Generated Weather in the United States," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol 80, 1819–1827, 1999.

• National Research Council, Committee on National Weather Service Modernization, Toward a New National Weather Service—Weather for Those Who Fly, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1994.

• Bruce, J.P., "Natural disaster reduction and global change," Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol 75, 1831- 2084, 1994.

American Meteorological Society

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

Prepared for the Web by Jacque Marshall