Decision support experiments and evaluations using seasonal to ...

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program
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approach discussed earlier—about the impacts
of such social movements.
While uncertainty is an inevitable factor in
regards to climate variability and weather information,
the communication of uncertainty—as
our discussion has shown—can be significantly
improved. Better understanding of innovative
ways to communicate uncertainty to users
should draw on additional literatures from
the engineering, behavioral and social, and
natural science communities (e.g., NRC 2005;
NRC 2006). Research efforts are needed by
various professional communities involved in
the generation and dissemination of climate information
to better establish how to define and
communicate climate variability risks clearly
and coherently and in ways that are meaningful
to water managers. Additional research is
needed to determine the most effective communication,
dissemination and evaluation tools
to deliver information on potential impacts of
climate variability, especially with regards to
such factors as further reducing uncertainties
associated with future sea-level rise, more reliable
predictions of changes in frequency and intensity
of tropical and extra-tropical storms, and
how saltwater intrusion will impact freshwater
resources, and the frequency of drought. Much
can be learned from the growing experience of
RISAs and other decision-support partnerships
and networks.
Research on lessons from other resource management
sectors on decision-support use and
decision maker/researcher collaboration would
be useful. While water issues are ubiquitous and
connect to many other resource areas, a great
deal of research has been done on the impediments
to, and opportunities for, collaboration
in other resource areas such as energy, forests,
coastal zone and hydropower. This research
suggests that there is much that water managers
and those who generate SI information on
climate variability could learn from this literature.
Among the questions that need further
investigation are issues surrounding the following
subject areas: (1) innovation (Are there
resource areas in which tool development and
use is proceeding at a faster pace than in water
management?); (2) organizational culture and
leadership (Are some organizations and agencies
more resistant to change, more hierarchical
in their decision making, more formalized in
their decisional protocols than is the case in
water management?); and (3) collaborative style
(Are some organizations in certain resource
areas or science endeavors better at collaborating
with stakeholder groups in the generation
of information tools, or other activities? [e.g.,
Kaufman, 1967; Bromberg, 2000]). Much can
also be learned about public expectations and
the expectations of user groups from their collaborations
with such agencies that could be
valuable to the water sector.
Chapter 4