Beyond the Radar

Some of the news comes in under the radar, and some of it is just apparently beyond it.

Washington is choked with snow, so if anyone noticed, it was apt to be rueful, but the Obama administration put another piece in place for the future. They announced Monday the creation of a new federal agency focused on gathering, studying and communicating information on climate.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, will be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency will initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service will be headquartered in Washington and will have six regional directors across the country.

Lubchenco [Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] also announced a new NOAA climate portal on the Internet to collect a vast array of climatic data from NOAA and other sources. It will be "one-stop shopping into a world of climate information," she said.

This is the latest of relatively quiet recent steps to focus federal science on the largest problem for the future. Another was the subtle re-purposing of NASA, which will be doing more to study Earth and its systems from space.