7TROPICAL Using Tropical Storm Value Chains to Better Meet End-User Needs

The damaging socioeconomic impacts of tropical storms affect the safety and livelihoods of millions of people who work and live along the coast, and cause supply chain disruptions, property damage and lost revenue across a wide range of sectors such as national security, aviation, energy and water supply, and agricultural production. NOAA’s Office for Coastal Management estimates hurricanes have caused more than $1.3 trillion in damage since 1980, with an average cost of $22.8 billion per event, and are responsible for 6,890 deaths.

Many agencies and organizations play a role in observations, forecasts, decision support services, and emergency management to better enable protection of life and property from tropical storms. The chain of activities and decisions that occur along that process is vast and complex. At NOAA, there is a newfound emphasis on comprehending how intricate that information influences those actions and responses across society. The NOAA Observing Systems Council (NOSC) focused on this complex challenge to develop an end-to-end value chain model to articulate these activities and decisions, and to identify horizontal trades that can be made across value chains. This value chain model will be applied across the vast landscape of observations, models, forecasts, and actions to understand how NOAA’s information creates added benefit to society, by how much, and how each NOAA activity influences that benefit. In parallel, NOAA’s Near Earth Orbit Network (NEON) Program is examining how Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environmental observations are integrated into decision-making and conceptual models. The NEON work emphasizes predictive models across a diverse set of thematic areas to understand how best to support future LEO Earth observations, and better understand the value of LEO observations.

In collaboration with the National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center, NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, NWS regional and local weather forecast offices, key NOAA stakeholders, partners and organizations, and local communities impacted by hurricanes, NOAA is developing value chains to capture and articulate gaps and bottlenecks, understand where NOAA’s observations generate added benefit to society, and showcase areas of opportunity along with greatest value to end-users. The authors will review how the value chains were developed, initial findings, followed by future work. Authors will discuss the importance of evaluating trades across the full end-to-end value chain to determine how NOAA can best meet user needs.