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Progress toward filling the weather and climate forecast needs of agricultural and natural resource management

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service (NWS) forecast offices discontinued issuing their locally tailored agricultural weather forecasts in 1996 as a result of reduced budgets and mounting political pressure to avoid competing with private industry in provision of application-specific forecasts (NOAA NWS 1995). Commercial forecast services did and do exist, but two obstacles preclude widespread use by many agricultural and natural resource managers in the United States: the expense, and a lack of confidence that they offer good value for the expense. At the same time, with the exception of the few rural radio stations that cater to agricultural interests, commercial media tend to concentrate on weather and climate issues important to their metropolitan markets. This situation has left many resource managers and agricultural producers underserved when it comes to forecasts appropriate to their decision support needs. However, the political tides have turned relative to commercial forecasts, and NOAA has gone through a cultural sea change. For more than a decade, NOAA has funded a range of exploratory research and focused workshops, originally to determine why their climate forecasts were not more widely used, and how they could or should be used. These efforts have grown…