| Summary: | Meeting the challenge to ensure societal value from scientific efforts demands the application of social and interdisciplinary science to better understand the vulnerabilities and resilience of sectors and communities and the way weather, water ice and climate (WWIC) information relates to relevant decision-making processes. It also requires improved methods to evaluate the societal impact of WWIC by measuring social and economic value across a wide spectrum of potential user communities and cultural, social, political, economic and geographic contexts. Improved polar prediction requires additional observations, enhanced process understanding, or higher resolution or more accurate numerical models. However, such advances in physical sciences must be made accessible to potential users in a form and fashion appropriate to their needs and resources. Across the polar regions, these users range from small indigenous communities scattered across the circumpolar Arctic, to regional industries and governmental activities relying on public weather services or private providers for information, to multi-national commercial ventures that may fund their own extremely specialized weather or sea ice products for their own uses.
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