Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM)
The Climate Observations and Monitoring program supports continuing, focused activities at universities, private research companies, and government laboratories to leverage NOAA's large volume of observational platforms, ranging from in-situ to remote datasets, and paleoclimate datasets. Projects develop long time-series, and higher level data products of essential climate variables and processes needed to understand the climate system on time scales ranging from days to a century, and longer. Housed within the Earth System Science and Modeling Division, COM encourages collaborations between the observations and modeling community that will increase the use and value of resulting datasets and products over the course of product development. COM-supported datasets and data products are made publicly available for multiple applications, including national and international climate assessment products.
View previous focus areas and funded project abstracts:
Program Partnerships
The COM program maintains partnerships with the Applied Research Center at the National Center for Environmental Information, and the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service, COM works with NOAA line offices to support activities to transfer research results to applications, such as satellite-based precipitation data.
The program participates in the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in the Indicators, Observations, and U.S. GEWEX working groups, as well as US CLIVAR.
For inquiries into partnering with the COM program, please contact Virginia Selz, virginia.selz@noaa.gov
More Information
Upcoming Activities: Facilitating collaborations between the observation and modeling communities (more information coming soon)
5-Year Highlights: FY2015 – 2020 (slides): Over the last five years, projects have provided information for assessments and monitoring, identified and characterized climate risks to society, and advanced climate prediction capacity through improved understanding of ocean-atmosphere interactions. Examples of data sets contributing to assessment efforts include atmospheric temperature, sea surface temperature, ocean heat content, precipitation, and snow and ice extent. Funded work has focused on extremes events related to hurricanes, heavy downpours, floods, droughts, and heat waves. And advanced the development and utilization of the last millennium reanalysis, the calculation of air sea fluxes, and the development of multiple global and regional ocean climate indices.
Additional Links and Resources
COM Program Handbook for PIs (link coming soon)
Climate.gov and Covid: Environmental Data for Health
United States Global Change Research Program: Climate Change Indicators