Alternative Climate Normals and Impacts to the Energy Industry

The Climate Normals workshop is a forum to bring together scientists and energy industry executives to share information and offer the opportunity to develop new alternatives for the energy industry.  In doing so, this workshop is intended to foster an open dialogue between the needs of the industry, the regulatory community, and the roles and needs of the research and scientific community.
 
Background
Over the past year, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) issued a complete set of new 1981-2010 Normals. Climate Normals are the latest three-decade averages of climatological variables, including temperature and precipitation. Meteorologists and climatologists regularly use Normals for placing recent climate conditions into a historical context. In addition to weather and climate comparisons, Normals are utilized in seemingly countless applications across a variety of sectors. These include: regulation of power companies, energy load forecasting, crop selection and planting times, construction planning, building design, and many others.
 
Climate Normals, however, were never designed to be metrics of climate change. In fact, when the widespread practice of computing climate Normals commenced in the 1930s, the generally accepted notion of the climate was that underlying long-term averages of climate time series were constant. In many cases, a shorter time period for Normals is being used more and more by industry, particularly the energy industry. 

 

 
This workshop is to bring scientists, researchers, business leaders, and various policy and regulatory decision-makers together to address the implications of using traditional normals, and discuss the options of alternative normals.  
 
Objectives
- Discuss the current use of climate normals in energy load forecasting
- Discuss opportunities and limitations of alternative normals
- Identify regulatory standards, needs from the industry, and opportunity for advancing the standards to enable flexibility
- Continue to build networks between industry, academia, and entrepreneurial solution-enablers interested in catalyzing private sector/industry growing interest in managing their risks, particularly with respect to climate adaptation
 

Please see website for agenda.

 

Registration and Logistics
Please visit http://www.joss.ucar.edu/events/2012/normal_nc/ for registration and logistics.  (The web site is currently up and running, but please note that the "Register Online Link" will not be activated for a few more days.)

Note that registration is limited to 75 participants.