Frontiers Appear at the Edges of Domains: Are We Still at the Edges Now for Assembling Policy maker Partnerships with Geoscientists for Projecting Climate Change?

Peering over the frontier of any domain, what can we see? When that domain is in the geosciences-as computing hydro-climate projections for water security futures in the US necessarily is now-we can often sketch what we expect to see based on what we already know, even when we do not make explicit extrapolations from specific past knowledge. Likewise, when that domain is in policy-making, experience helps us describe what we expect to find. We want to be certain, however, that we are not limited to seeing only what we expect to see when looking from one frontier at the other. Complex chains of numerical process models are used to project future hydro-climates in part so that we can see things over the geoscience frontiers that we would not expect. But how do we maintain that over-the-horizon view of the unexpected when we routinely must use simplified projection summaries to characterize responses …