Users of climate model information face difficulty in assessing which models and projections are best for their particular needs. This difficulty stems from the abundance of climate information, as well as the relative inaccessibility or unavailability of information concerning a given model’s quality, trade-offs, and suitability for a particular geographic region or decision-making application. As a knowledge broker for climate information in the Great Lakes region, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments (GLISA), a CPO RISA team, has developed a suite of climate model consumer reports to help climate information users make informed decisions when selecting models and projections for their work. Consumer reports have traditionally provided potential consumers with background knowledge and a thorough review of available products and services to help these consumers to make decisions.
To develop the reports GLISA reviewed examples of consumer reports from other sectors, relied on the feedback and advice of their ongoing Practitioner Working Group, and incorporated otherwise unavailable information from model developers. Through a close, continuing partnership with the Practitioner Working Group, both the content and the formatting of their climate model consumer reports respond directly to the needs of information users. GLISA believes that climate model consumer reports, especially when developed in the context of trusted user-knowledge broker relationships, can be used to make climate information more relevant to and usable by practitioners.
This article was adapted from the abstract to their early online release in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
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