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NOAA-led Synthesis and Assessment Product 5.3 Released
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program recently released Synthesis and Assessment Product 5.3: Decision Support Experiments and Evaluations Using Seasonal to Interannual Forecasts and Observational Data: A Focus on Water Resources.

Synthesis and Assessment Product 5.3
Synthesis and Assessment
Product 5.3
The Product documents connections between the scientific ability to predict climate on seasonal scales and the opportunity to incorporate such understanding into water resource management decisions. The NOAA-led scientific assessment shows that expanding the use of seasonal to interannual climate forecasts, especially in drought-prone and semi-arid parts of the United States, and fostering closer cooperation between climate scientists and water resources managers can assist decision makers in the management of water resources.

Nancy Beller-Simms of the Climate Program Office chaired the team that produced the report, serving as Executive Editor of the Product. Helen Ingram, David Feldman, Nathan Mantua, Katharine L. Jacobs, and Anne Waple served as authors and contributing editors. Additional contributions by many others culminated in a richly illustrated document that will serve water resource managers across the U.S. and its territories. The report is available at www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap5-3/final-report

VOCALS-REx Field Campaign
During October and November 2008, some 150 scientists from 40 institutions in eight nations will take part in the Variability of the American Monsoon Systems' (VAMOS) Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Study Regional Experiment (VOCALS-REx).

Figure 1
Fig. 1 The VOCAL-REx Field Campaign. Schematic of the Variability of the American Monsoon Systems (VAMOS) Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Regional Experiment (VOCALS-REx).
VOCALS-REx is an international field program designed to make observations of critical components in the coupled climate system of the southeastern Pacific that are poorly understood and poorly represented in global climate models. That region is dominated by strong coastal upwelling and extensive cold sea surface temperatures; and it is home to the largest deck of stratocumulus clouds on Earth.

Specific foci of the campaign will be on processes controlling the properties of stratocumulus clouds, processes controlling the ocean transport of cold freshwater offshore, and chemical and physical interactions between the lower atmosphere and upper ocean. The experiment is a major component of the VOCALS program whose primary goal is to achieve improved understanding, model simulations, and predictions of the southeastern Pacific region's coupled ocean-atmosphere-land system on diurnal to inter-annual timescales. VOCAL-REx is an interagency effort with major contributions from the NOAA Climate Program Office's Climate Prediction Program for the Americas (CPPA) and Atmospheric Composition and Climate Program (ACCP). For more information, visit the VOCALs Web site.

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Last Updated on October 28, 2008