As Florida’s Gulf Coast endures a second catastrophic hurricane in less than two weeks, federal officials on Tuesday announced plans to create a national climate service able to issue shorter-term forecasts on a warming planet that can amplify the danger of such storms along with flooding, heat waves and wildfires.
The new service — not unlike the National Weather Service — will be aimed at providing more specific projections to help planners and emergency managers.
The hope is that will allow local officials to prepare so that risks like the devastating flooding that followed Hurricane Helene can be avoided or at least lessened.
“You need to think about weather and climate across time scales as being a seamless problem, because the city manager of Miami Beach doesn't care if it's a weather thing or a climate thing,” said atmospheric scientist Ben Kirtman, a professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School and a principal investigator on the project. "We're fixated on these definitive time horizons, whereas we really need to think continuously about how are we going to deal with this every day."
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In a statement, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration outlined plans to spend $15.3 million to develop the forecasting ability using existing resources.
The money will come from the Inflation Reduction Act, a Biden administration initiative that Congress, and is aimed at fighting climate change and replacing fossil fuel use with clean energy. The goal is to “develop new information services to help communities better prepare for the impacts of extreme weather and climate disasters brought on by climate change,” U.S Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a statement.
Current climate predictions are often too broad for local planners and on time-scales that make it difficult for elected officials to decide budgeting, Kirtman said.
“It's bridging the time scale of what's going to happen a month from now, two months from now, with what's going to happen ten years from now,” Kirtman said. “That's where the really fertile ground is in getting everybody to understand the challenges.”
That means resolving the discrepancy between weather forecasting, that relies heavily on historical trends, and climate projections that look forward using models incorporating evolving conditions.
“The past is not a good predictor anymore of what's going to happen in the future,” he said. “And so they need to figure out how to do the forward problem.”
UM will receive up to $5.8 million to figure out how to implement the forecasting. That could mean creating a group that handles local forecasts or embedding a climate specialist in local offices for the National Weather Service around the country, where meteorologists work with local emergency managers on immediate threats, like hurricanes and floods.
“It's the failure of systems during extreme events that we then figure out how to do things. We can't just wait for that ten year projection to come true. We have to start doing it today."Ben Kirtman, professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School
“If we put in a climate person in each one of those offices or someone that is assigned the climate portfolio, you could imagine it would be one-stop shopping for Miami-Dade,” Kirtman said.
In addition to UM receiving an initial $2.8 million to kickstart the work, Florida International University will receive $400,000. Atmospheric scientist James Hurrell, the former director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and now a professor at Colorado State University, was awarded another $1.2 million, while NCAR received $1.4 million.
This is not the first time NOAA and federal officials have tried to tackle better climate forecasting. But about 20 years ago when it first surfaced, less was known about impacts and forecasting. Agencies across the sciences needed to better understand how it affected their work. Today, Kirtman said, it’s clear that NOAA is needed to step in and handle forecasting, to organize a “firehose” of information that planners wrestle with.
“I think all the agencies are OK, that's NOAA’s wheelhouse. We still have a lot of science to do, but how do we make predictions that people can act on? That's really NOAA’s responsibility,” he said.
He’s hoping that once it becomes available, the forecasts become routine, including becoming part of TV weather reports where some meteorologists already provide more basic explanations of climate impacts. Specific information can then help the public plan ahead for matters as simple as travel or complicated as buying a house.
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To do that, the information will need to be hyperlocal, meaning scientists will need to find reliable ways to constrain the huge amounts of data on climate.
“How do we eliminate the bad models? How do we identify that our techniques for making it hyperlocal, don't introduce new uncertainties that we haven't quantified,” Kirtman explained.
The groups will be working with NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, which currently works on climate forecasts. It’s not clear how long it will take to develop the forecasts, but Kirtman said the center is already working on test cases for real world examples, like coral reef bleaching, heat domes or excessive king tides.
“It's the failure of systems during extreme events that we then figure out how to do things,” he said. “We can't just wait for that ten year projection to come true. We have to start doing it today.”
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