The Southeast Regional Climate Center (SERCC), one of six regional climate centers across the United States, was established in March 1989 and has been housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since June 2007. The SERCC program was created in response to a variety of user needs for regional climate services in the Southeast, including Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The central mission of the SERCC is to provide timely, high-quality, and relevant climate data and information to both public and private users across the region. In order to achieve this mission, the SERCC engages in several important activities on a consistent basis. First, a suite of web-based tools has been developed to provide users with value-added climate data and information that is suitable for a wide range of applications. Some notable examples include the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS) database, Southeast Climate Perspectives, and the Heat-Health Vulnerability Toolkit. Second, the service climatologist at SERCC fulfills frequent media requests from across the region, constructs climatological summaries for extreme events, and engages in public outreach through social media. SERCC climatologists contributed regional climate analyses to the latest U.S. National Climate Assessment in 2014 and constructed a climatological summary of the Atlanta “Snow Jam” event that was used for the FEMA disaster declaration. Finally, since 2007, SERCC employees have published 15 peer-reviewed scientific papers and given over 30 oral or poster presentations at professional conferences across the United States.
For more information about the Southeast Regional Climate Center, please visit our website: http://www.sercc.com/.