Monitoring Climate Change and its Impacts: Physical Climate Indicators: NCA Report Series, Volume 5b

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) convened a workshop on "Physical Climate Indicators" in March, 2011 as part of a series on "Monitoring Climate Change and its Impacts". The overarching goal of this workshop was to identify a few broad categories of potential physical climate indicators using a set of priorities developed by the NCA, and to provide a clear justification for how they would inform the Nation about climate change. Additional goals included providing input on the overall NCA framework for selecting the indicators and suggesting methodologies to construct indicators. Although one of the workshop goals was to address the status of current observational networks to support indicators, this was not a main focus of any single discussion.