WASHINGTON - The Obama administration yesterday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.

Climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns, and cause polar melting.

Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA would set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA's National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.

"Climate change represents a real threat," Locke said yesterday at a news conference.

Lubchenco added, "Climate change is real; it's happening now." She said climate information was vital to the wind-power industry; coastal community planning; fishermen and fishery managers; farmers; and public-health officials.

NOAA recently reported that the decade of 2000-09 was the warmest on record worldwide; the previous warmest decade was the 1990s. Most atmospheric scientists believe that warming is largely due to human actions, adding gases to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

"More and more people are asking for more and more information about climate and how it's going to affect them," Lubchenco explained. So officials decided to combine climate operations into a single unit.

Portions of the Weather Service that have been studying climate, as well as offices from some other NOAA agencies, would be transferred to the new NOAA Climate Service.

The new agency would initially be led by Thomas Karl, director of the current National Climatic Data Center. The Climate Service would be based in Washington and have six regional directors across the country.

Lubchenco also announced a new NOAA climate portal on the Internet to collect a vast array of climatic data from NOAA and other sources. It will be "one-stop shopping into a world of climate information," she said.

Creation of the Climate Service requires a series of steps, including congressional committee approval. But if all goes well, it should be finished by the end of the year, officials said.

In recent years, a widespread private weather-forecasting industry has grown up around the National Weather Service. Lubchenco said she anticipated growth of private climate-related business around the new agency.