Weather and Society Watch
Related Resources

Information Resources Make a Move

NCAR’s Societal Impacts Program Acquires Valuable Weather Impacts Sites
by Emily Laidlaw*

During the last 8 months, we’ve worked with Roger Pielke, Jr., and the staff of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) to move two of Pielke’s resources on the societal impacts of weather and weather forecasting to the Societal Impacts Program (SIP) Web site (http://www.sip.ucar.edu/). We extend our sincere gratitude to Pielke and his team for their assistance with this transition.

The Extreme Weather Sourcebook—now located at http://www.sip.ucar.edu/sourcebook/—is a database of societal statistics on severe weather, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The Societal Aspects of Weather site—http://www.sip.ucar.edu/socasp/—is a clearinghouse of other Web sites about weather’s societal impacts in many areas, including emergency management and the insurance industry. Soon, we’ll begin updating both sites with the most current information available.

This newsletter, Weather and Society Watch, is modeled after another of Pielke’s resources, WeatherZine, a bimonthly newsletter that circulated from 1996 to 2002. Weather and Society Watch is available online at http://www.sip.ucar.edu/news/. WeatherZine archives are available at http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/zine/archives/.

We also host a weather and society newsgroup called WxSoc on the SIP Web site. Through this newsgroup, we encourage societal impacts researchers, policy makers, and other interested parties to post and receive relevant information. For more information or to subscribe, please visit http://www.sip.ucar.edu/wxsoc.jsp.

We hope that the acquisition of Pielke’s weather and weather forecasting resources combined with the creation of new societal impacts resources will help SIP become a reliable international weather impacts resource.

*Emily (laidlaw@ucar.edu) is an Associate Scientist with NCAR’s SIP. For more on our collection of information resources, visit http://www.sip.ucar.edu/resources.jsp.