Biden Admin Awards $7.2M for Better Climate Forecasting

The U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced this week a $7.2 million award to external partners and NOAA collaborators to improve climate projections.

The goal is to help communities, businesses and industries better plan for the future by producing climate projections for multiple years and even decades in advance and then taking action to reduce the damage and loss from potential weather extremes.

“NOAA has a long history of expert weather and climate forecasting,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo in a press release. “This new set of projects, which were made possible by funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda and the Inflation Reduction Act, are designed to significantly advance the quality and breadth of products NOAA provides to better prepare the nation, our communities and industries for the impacts of climate change in future years and decades.”

The initiative, Climate Futures: Projections for Societally Relevant Problems, will be lead by the NOAA Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections Program. The project will test the quality of information produced by NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory model to simulate near-term and future high-impact extreme climate events.“The NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab has pioneered Earth System models from its founding in 1955,” said Sarah Kapnick, NOAA chief scientist. “The lab’s SPEAR climate model — the first high-resolution model used for seamless prediction across seasonal to decadal timescales — will be used to create new products and services to help build the nation’s climate resilience.”