An effort by the Bush administration to improve federal climate research has answered some questions but lacks a focus on impacts of changing conditions and informing those who would be most affected, a panel of experts has found.

The Climate Change Science Program, created in 2002 by President Bush to improve climate research across 13 government agencies, has also been hampered by governmental policies that have grounded earth-observing satellites and dismantled programs to monitor environmental conditions on earth, concluded the report, issued by the National Academies, the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group.

In a printed statement, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, the panel’s chairman, said that the program’s basic scientific efforts had constituted “an important initiative that has broadened our knowledge of climate change.”

Among other things, the report noted, the effort has helped resolve disputes over whether the earth’s atmosphere is warming significantly or not, allowing scientists to compare data and agree that warming is occurring.