Surge Staffing: How It Worked During The Drought Busting 2022/2023 Winter Season In California

Between December 2022 and March 2023, a relentless onslaught of Pacific storms and atmospheric rivers took aim at California, and in particular the Central Coast. National Weather Service (NWS) San Francisco / Monterey Bay Areas provided an evolving suite of forecast, warning, and decision support services during this multi-month period, where numerous life-threatening weather and water hazards occurred simultaneously. NWS Bay Area staff deployed to multiple Emergency Operation Centers (EOCs), while providing virtual support to others. Limited staffing and fatigue required thinking outside the box to support the mission, and us to become users of our own products. So how did we meet the need of onsite and virtual EOC customer support? Surge Staffing.

Surge staffing was employed to meet this demand and allow NWS Bay Area to provide decision support services on an unprecedented level for NWS Bay Area. NWS Bay Area provided numerous email briefings, over 400 virtual EOC calls, multiple deployments, and thousands of media interviews during the unforgiving 2022-2023 winter season. Given this demand, NWS Bay Area utilized NWS Western Region (WR) assistance to bring in additional staffing to manage the DSS messaging and warning operations, while NWS Bay Area meteorologists deployed to area EOCs as well as provided virtual support to other EOCs. While the NWS Southern Region routinely pre-stages staff prior to tropical cyclone landfalls, surge staffing is a relatively new concept for WR. WR first utilized surge staffing in support of the emergency management community during West Coast Super Bowls. The first time surge staffing was utilized for hazardous weather though was during the 2019 Kincade Fire, followed by a virtual deployment for the 2020 Lightning Fires across the Central Coast. This surge staff concept was put to a test in January when the first batch of external help arrived and NWS Bay Area was averaging 12 virtual Operational Area (OA) briefings per day while 4 meteorologists were physically embedded in EOCs. NWS Bay Area and WR then took the lessons learned and applied them to the remainder of this season, bringing in deployed resources four additional times in support of our partners. This discussion will review the unprecedented 2022-2023 winter season, lessons learned, and how we became better users of our own forecast information to utilize and implement surge staffing.