AMS CCS Telcon, Friday May 9, 2009
Participants: Ed O'Lenic, Ryan Boyles, Holly Hartmann,
Ryan: Private sector representative needs to be found to discuss a working business model.
Holly: Private sector is complex. Many privates work in the federal govt. Then there is the large business sector, the small and the middle sized businesses. Mid-level groups feel like they are getting passed over. They do modeling and may feel some competition from the government. Bart Njissen of 3-Tier is an example of someone who might be able to give the mid-size company point of view. Ryan: Phil Pasteris CH2mHill. Another possibility. Holly: Malcolm Purney, HDL are all spinning up climate change applications.
Ed: Hill testimony this week mentioned CPC forecasts 6 times, including the two Public Utility Commission people from San Fransisco and Seattle.
Holly: Might be useful to contact PUC people to see how they are using CPC forecasts.
ED: The probability of exceedance (POE) is a regionally-focused survival curve that gives a detailed climatology and the implications of the long lead forecast.
Holly: We are looking at the option to allow people to build their own POE, interactively.
Ryan: Roger Getz, AWIS, Alabama is a a private sector person who speaks well about public-private issues.
Holly: He might be a good private sector speaker on Climate services.
Ryan: There has been much discussion about Climate Services between CVC, Applied Climatology and Policy. STAC committees need to coordinate more. I will consult with the co-chairs and report. Applied Climatology is doing a short course on accessing climate data, so they are quite busy right now. Now that the Climate Services planning is in progress, the focus of the community s less on making recommendations to NOAA, and more on relationship between public and private.
Ed: Need to find a way to get users to evaluate their cost/benefit, so products can be designed to address them.
Ryan: I know someone who is using ROC to evaluate cost/loss - will get his name. Fred Semazzi is also a possibility, but he is often traveling, and hard to get.
Ed: Big companies can afford to use low skill forecasts, are diversified, small companies find it harder to use them, since they have relatively fewer investment options.
Ed: We might want to consider writing a BAMS article about climate services issues.
Holly: We might need to try some different things for webinars. Maybe we don't have to reach consensus. High level discussions and nuts and bolts discussions would be useful. We need to do more ground work. This does not require consensus.
Ed: There are lots of issues to discuss - NCS, Public-private, business models that work and don't, etc.... Maybe we could have several monthly webinars to engage the community on a variety of issues, instead of focusing on a single issue - we can't seem to form a consensus on any such single issue anyway.
Holly, Ryan: Sounds good.
Ed: Next meeting will be May 22, 2009 at 11:00 AM EDT.
ED: I welcome comments from those who could not attend today's meeting on the topics discussed above.