Forecasters Supporting Forecasters: The Increase of Mutual Aid Programs within the National Weather Service

The National Weather Service (NWS) mission is to protect lives and property, but as that mission expands to Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS), social media, and assessing the mesoscale environment to improve forecasting and warning accuracy, the workload on a Weather Forecast Office (WFO) continues to grow. To meet the increasing needs and to maintain forecaster work-life balance, the NWS has begun to break down County Warning Area and Regional boundaries, building several regional and national mutual aid programs, to expand on the well established service backup capabilities. While the service backup capability ensures that warning and forecasts continue when technical issues arise or weather threatens an office, these new mutual aid capabilities also allow forecasters across the NWS to share their expertise in language translation, mesoscale analysis, social media data mining, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and other areas. This sharing of expertise leads to improved service across the organization, richer information and knowledge sharing, and better support for unique responsibilities like Spanish translation, finding storm reports, and GIS applications and output. These mutual aid programs, like the Supplemental Assistance Volunteer Initiative (SAVI), Multimedia Assistance in Spanish (MAS), and the Remote Mesoanalysis Support (RMA), among others, are run by teams of forecasters across the National Weather Service including both Regional and National representation. Mutual aid programs are being championed by leadership across the NWS because as the organization continues to evolve, forecasters supporting each other through mutual aid will realize the vision of one NWS void of boundaries.