Delivering and evaluating climate services: The North Central climate and drought webinar series

Authors: HAIGH, TONYA - University Of Nebraska; KLUCK, DOUGLAS - National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Todey, Dennis; Nowatzke, Laurie

Submitted to: Weather, Climate, and Society
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 5/24/2024
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: Understanding how people understand and use weather and climate information and their decision process is an active area of research in climate services. This paper is an effort to address one rare set of information, a review of a set of data covering services for over a 10 year period. The North Central Climate and Drought Webinar series has been providing monthly webinar updates about current and projected weather and climate issues in the North Central United States since 2012. Twice during this over 10 year period attendees were surveyed to assess the value of the webinars to the attendees and determine how people were using the information. This paper reviews the findings from these surveys over time and does a review of how people use the information provided from the webinars in their decision-making. This study helps to establish practices for evaluating climate services for other climate service providers (ie state climatologists, etc.) to further develop. It also is valuable for climate service providers to show impact of their services and how they can be improved for stakeholder use.

Technical Abstract: Evaluation of near-term (sub)seasonal climate services’ impact is challenging but necessary for ensuring that society’s needs for actionable information are met. We use a descriptive study of the monthly North Central Climate and Drought Webinar Series at two time points (2014 and 2021) to examine societal impacts on capacity-building, sense-making, fact-establishing, communication, decision-making, and social-ecological systems. The North Central Climate and Drought Webinar Series arose following a 2011 climate disaster and established itself over the next ten years as a monthly resource for climate and impact information translation and interaction. Survey respondents indicated early benefits related to understanding how to find and use climate information and improved conceptual understanding of climate issues and problems. Many used webinar information to compare with other sources of data or to incorporate into their own communications, uses which can increase overall societal trust in climate information over time. Attendees’ self-reported capacity for using climate information in decision-making and actual use of information in specific decisions or management context increased as the webinar series approached the ten-year mark. Most participants did not note financial or other social-ecological outcomes of their use of the webinars. We conclude by recommending that climate services be evaluated over sufficiently long time periods to capture evolving impacts, and that evaluations incorporate impact rubrics that measure subtle yet important societal capacities and decision-making processes related to climate risk management.