Within the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Office of Global Programs (OGP) has lead responsibility for the agency's Climate and Global Change Program. The Climate and Global Change Program represents NOAA's contribution to the on-going national and international programs that are designed to improve our ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to changes in the global environment. The OGP program builds on NOAA's mission requirements and longstanding capabilities in global change research and prediction. NOAA has the primary responsibility within the Federal Government to routinely provide climate forecasts and products to the Nation. OGP assists in this capacity by sponsoring focused scientific research, within approximately eleven research elements, all aimed at understanding climate variability and its predictability. Through studies in these areas, researchers coordinate activities that jointly contribute to improved predictions and assessments of climate variability over a continuum of time scales from season to season, year to year, and over the course of a decade and beyond.

NOAA's Climate and Global Change Program is an integral part of the interagency U.S. Global Change Research Program, and works to achieve an important objective of global change--understanding the global climate system. As part of NOAA's contribution, OGP also guides NOAA's effort in spearheading the multinational initiative to establish an International Research Institute and associated regional applications centers to generate and disseminate forecast guidance. This initiative is made possible because of new scientific advancements in predicting temperature and precipitation patterns associated with El Nino variations, and promotes the generation and dissemination of forecast information.

The NOAA Climate and Global Change Program is currently funding research in the following areas:

• Aerosols - research to improve the capabilities for predicting the role of anthropogenic aerosols in forcing climatic change.
• Atlantic Climate Change Program (ACCP) - climate variability related to the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Atlantic tropical sea surface temperature "dipole".
• Atmospheric Chemistry - global monitoring, process-oriented laboratory and field studies, and theoretical modeling to improve the predictive understanding of the concentrations and interactions of atmospheric trace gases that influence the Earth's chemical and radiative balance.
• Climate Change Data and Detection - data and information management support (i.e., data assembly, processing, inventory, distribution and archiving), and documentation of the quantitative character of observed climate variations and changes.
• Climate Dynamics and Experimental Prediction - utilizing the climate model developed by the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to study climate variability and change.
• Climate Observations - ocean, atmosphere, and land surface climate observations, measurement systems and techniques.
• Economics and Human Dimensions of Climate Fluctuations - aimed at understanding how social and economic systems are currently influenced by fluctuations in short-term climate (seasons to years), and how human behavior can be (or why it may not be) affected by improved predictions of climate variations.
• Education - development and dissemination of climate and global change information for teachers, students, and educational institutions.
• GEWEX Continental Scale International Project (GCIP) - NOAA's contribution to the GEWEX Continental scale International Project, emphasizing scale integration of hydrometeorological processes in climate models and transfer of representations of these processes into climate models either through a nested model approach or improved land surface schemes.
• Global Ocean - Atmosphere - Land System (GOALS) - to understand global climate variability on seasonal-to-interannual time scales; to determine the extent to which this variability is predictable; to develop the observational theoretical, and computational means to predict this variability; and to foster the development of experimental predictions within the limits of proven feasibility.
• Ocean-Atmosphere Carbon Exchange Study (OACES) - part of NOAA's contribution to the completion of the NOAA/DOE/NSF-sponsored Global Ocean Carbon Dioxide Survey and a continuing effort to improve our understanding of the role of the ocean in sequestering the increasing burden of anthropogenically-derived carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
• Paleoclimatology - utilization of paleoclimate data to develop an understanding of the seasonal to century-scale variability and predictability of the ENSO and African/Asian monsoon systems, the ocean thermohaline system and its relation to global change, and the hydrologic system at regional to global scales, as it relates to the above.

OGP's participation in these areas has assisted NOAA in augmenting the state of science in the United States, guiding the direction of NOAA's research efforts, and providing valuable scientific data and information for practical use and social and economic benefit.