to the research community. This should include ocean analyses, land analyses, coupled-climate analyses, and atmospheric reanalysis. The research community will benefit from having the various analyses to diagnose, and the operational climate observational community (when they exist) will benefit from the diagnoses. The Centers will have improvements in observing design for their own diverse purposes as one of their tasks, so that both observations and modeling will benefit from an optimized observing system.

We do not mean to imply that the entire climate research community should be engaged with climate operations—this would be neither practical nor desirable. But the benefits to be gained from having climate research interacting with climate operations would stimulate research and enrich operations to an extent that the benefits of interaction would be hard to overlook.

Climate Research and Climate Operations are not interchangeable and both are needed to construct and disseminate climate information products for the benefit of society. Climate Operations will be expensive, with the major cost being the climate observing system. Because of the integrated nature of the functions needed for Climate Operations, high-end modeling must be considered an essential part of operations.

The nation needs the best possible climate information on which to base decisions about the future. The panel has no doubt that the nation will, at some point in the future, choose to institute Climate Operations. An effective high-end climate modeling activity is an essential step on the way.