Facility for Weather and Climate Assessments (FACTS) A Community Resource for Assessing Weather and Climate Variability

The Facility for Weather and Climate Assessments (FACTS) developed at the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory is a freely available resource that provides the science community with analysis tools; multimodel, multiforcing climate model ensembles; and observational/reanalysis datasets for addressing a wide class of problems on weather and climate variability and its causes. In this paper, an overview of the datasets, the visualization capabilities, and data dissemination techniques of FACTS is presented. In addition, two examples are given that show the use of the interactive analysis and visualization feature of FACTS to explore questions related to climate variability and trends. Furthermore, we provide examples from published studies that have used data downloaded from FACTS to illustrate the types of research that can be pursued with its unique collection of datasets.