|
Environmental and Societal Impacts Group (ESIG)
|
FY95 Significant Accomplishments
- Michael Glantz convened the ENSO/North American Applications
Workshop in Boulder.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA)
Office of Global Programs (OGP) supported this multidisciplinary,
multinational meeting, which focused on the socio-economic use of
forecast information related to both warm and cold events in the
equatorial Pacific Ocean.
This workshop, the second "Usable
Science" workshop built on the experiences of earlier conferences,
focused on the use of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-related
information in decision-making. Usable Science workshops have an
explicit impact on some potential users of ENSO information.
- A paper by Richard Katz on the use of stochastic weather generators
to produce scenarios
of climate change will appear in Climatic Change, along with two
other papers that utilized his research in assessing the
sensitivity of crop yields to changes in climate variability. In
this way, improvements in the methodology of assessing the
agricultural impacts of climate variability and change are being
disseminated to a multidisciplinary readership.
- Kathleen Miller
convened the
Institute on the Economics of the
Climate Resource in
Boulder. Sponsored by NOAA/OGP, this Institute was designed to
introduce economists in research and policy positions to a body of
information relevant to research on the economic aspects of
climate variability and climate change. By bringing together
economists working on a wide variety of climate-related topics,
the Institute furthered the development of this research
community.
- Roger Pielke Jr.
published the results of a major study entitled
Hurricane Andrew in
South Florida: Mesoscale Weather and Societal Responses.
This
publication represented the culmination of the first stage of a
program supported by Special NSF/ATM funds to examine recent
extreme mesoscale events and their societal impacts. It is the
first major ESIG activity related to the social science aspects of
weather research in support of the U.S. Weather Research Program
(USWRP).
- Glantz prepared a book-length manuscript tentatively entitled Currents of Change: El
Niño's Impact on Climate and Society.
This book will be published in
FY96 by Cambridge University Press (UK).
In addition to
discussing various aspects of El Niño and related phenomena, Glantz
has chronicled the development of scientific and public interest
in El Niño and has included 36 personal statements of prominent
researchers who have researched El Niño over the past 30 years. It
is the first popular book on the El Niño phenomenon.
ASR 1995 Home Page
ESIG Home Page
www.esig.ucar.edu
ESIG / NCAR, PO Box 3000, Boulder, CO 80307 USA
Tel (303) 497-8117; Fax (303) 497-8125
jan@ucar.edu