Innovative Geospatial Tools and Technologies to Empower NWS Service Equity Success

The National Weather Service (NWS) is embarking on a dedicated effort to provide its preparedness efforts, data, forecasts, warnings, impact-based decision support services (IDSS), and other services in a more equitable manner. The overall goal is to ensure timely and actionable weather, water, and climate information is provided to all communities, with a specific focus on underserved and vulnerable populations (UVPs). Reorienting the agency to broaden its capacity to engage with all communities will require both operational changes and focused outreach and education efforts. Field offices are at the forefront of this change, as they most directly and frequently interact with local communities. Understanding the unique characteristics of the people they serve is one of the most important steps in connecting with their communities and building new relationships. However, easily-accessible datasets to assess community characteristics and robust methods to track community engagement are not widely available to NWS field office employees.

In response to these needs, the NWS Social Vulnerability Impact Assessment Tool (SVIAT) was developed and is being deployed across the agency. This web-based ArcGIS Online application serves as an interactive repository of various geospatial datasets and social vulnerability indices that empower NWS employees to learn more about the nuanced challenges their communities face. The goal of making this data available to field office personnel is to have more equity-informed outreach and education interactions, leading to new partnerships and increased trust within their communities. The SVIAT also features a reporting mechanism for these interactions, which improves on the legacy NWS Outreach and Education Event System (NOEES) by adding a geospatial component and other details to the engagement record. By seeing where interactions were performed in the past, field offices will be able to make concerted efforts in planning future outreach activities to ensure effective engagement with as many communities as possible. Finally, the tool will encourage investigation of the unique characteristics of local communities that are not captured by Census-derived vulnerability indices. In short, increased experience-based knowledge coupled with an improved understanding of the challenges communities face, will lead to informed future interactions resulting in more equitable, accessible, and actionable services from the NWS. The SVIAT will become operational in the NWS through 2025, afterwards it will be integrated into NWS Connect, the agency's interactive, growing toolset for IDSS and Community Engagement.