The National Assessment Synthesis Team is a federally chartered advisory committee responsible for the intellectual leadership of the National Assessment process. It was created in early 1998 under the auspices of the National Science Foundation. The Synthesis Team has held two meetings: an organizational meeting in February and its first official meeting in April. At these meetings, they:

• Developed strategies for climate and socioeconomic scenarios;
• Selected 5 sectors to receive special treatment in this first assessment (water, health, coasts, agriculture, forests);
• Discussed and approved co-chairs and members for the sector teams;
• Discussed a strategy for templates that covered both general methodology and report table of contents.
• Discussed how the regions might coordinate with the sectors and the Synthesis Team and how regional contributions might best be incorporated into the Synthesis Report.

Current Synthesis Team activities include:

• Refining Information needs for scenarios
• Developing templates for the regional and sectoral reposts
• Distributing historical monthly and daily data for the regional and sectoral teams (CD-ROM and web site)
• Collecting scenario results fromseveral climate models and making results accessible to the regional and sectoral teams
• Facilitating 3 special model runs (base line, transient, stabilization) by the National Center for Atmospheric Research
• Developing a long-term strategy for archiving and providing user support for these data sets.

Synthesis team members

Co-chairs:

• Tony Janetos, National Aeronautics and Space Administration
• Jerry Melillo, Ecosystems Center Marine Biological Laboratory

Members:

• Eric Barron, Penn State University
• Linda Joyce, Colorado State University
• Tom Karl, National Climate Data Center
• Barbara Miller, Rankin International, Inc.
• Granger Morgan, Carnegie Mellon University
• Ted Parson, Harvard/Kennedy School of Government
• Richard Richels, Electric Power Research Institute
• Dave Schimel, National Center for Atmospheric Research