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:

• FY14 Extremes and Ocean Climate Indicators
• FY14 Paleoclimatology Proxy/Multi-proxy reconstructions and analyses
• FY17 Ocean Climate and Global Climate Indicators
• FY18 High Quality Datasets for Enhancing Predictions and Informing Stakeholders 
• FY20 Developing Terrestrial-, Marine-, and Ice-atmosphere Boundary Layer datasets
• FY21 Atmospheric impacts due to changes in Anthropogenic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic
• FY21 Innovative Ocean Dataset/Product Analysis and Development

COM Advances CPO Climate Risk Areas

• Climate Risk Area Initiative: COM-funded research improves understanding and advances use of NOAA data in CPO's four climate risk areas: Water Resources, Extreme Heat, Marine Ecosystems, and Coastal Inundation. Read more about COM's contributions to CPO's Risk Area Initiative here.
• Marine Ecosystems - Climate Risk Area Initiative: The program leads CPO's cross-office Climate Risk Area team focused on Marine Ecosystems (MERT - Marine Ecosystem Risk Team) which is initiating a Climate in Sanctuaries Task Force in FY23 following the FY22 COM/MAPP/CSI Competition focused on Sanctuaries. This initiative is supported by the NOAA Climate Science in Sanctuaries Workshop and Report. 

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 COM program partners with other NOAA programs and offices to coordinate initiatives and research funding competitions: COM partnered with GOMO and CVP, as well as AC4 in FY21. COM partnered with MAPP and CSI in FY22. 
• Over the last 5 years, approximately 60% of competitively funded projects have at least one NOAA collaborator inclusive of OAR Labs, NESDIS, and NWS scientists. 
• Please contact Virginia Selz (virginia.selz@noaa.gov) for questions regarding COM's on-going activities and future opportunities to increase engagement.

More Information

• Interagency Involvement: The program participates in U.S. CLIVAR and the USGCRP working groups: Indicators; Observations; and US GEWEX and collaborates with CPO programs, OAR labs, and the Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program Office.  For inquiries into potential partnerships with the COM program, please contact: virginia.selz@noaa.gov

• Research Informing Assessments and Monitoring: 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.     
• Research Informing User-Friendly Platforms: Research results have supported data and stories for Climate.gov and Covid: Environmental Data for Health, for United States Global Change Research Program: Climate Change Indicators, and for Drought.gov.