Description:

The NWS’s Weather Ready Nation has reimagined the scientific needs and direction of the NWS by better integrating the science of hazardous weather with the needs of the people threatened by that weather. The Weather Ready Nation concept has reinforced the NWS’s mandate to provide science-in-service to the protection of lives and property, and it has had profound implications across the NWS and across the core partners that the NWS serves. Like the NWS, the USGS is an agency tasked with providing reliable scientific information to minimize the loss of life and property. With these similarities in mind, USGS has partnered with the NWS to develop its own “Hazard Ready Nation” initiative. For the USGS, this has meant intensive efforts to understand lessons learned from the NWS to avoid pitfalls, and to identify those differences in the USGS that might require novel approaches to implementing such an initiative.  

At its core, the “Ready Nation” concept centers on partnerships in the conceptualization, development, and delivery of actionable scientific information to help communities be better prepared for hazard events.  To make this a reality, partnerships with the many publics that the Federal government serves must be created, maintained, and recognized. These partnerships can then inform the services and products an agency provides to warn, forecast, understand, and assess hazards to enhance mitigation and preparedness across the nation. As the Weather Ready Nation initiative has shown, shifts in the organizational culture and science priorities within a Federal agency may be needed to make the “Ready Nation” approach a driving philosophy across the workforce. This panel will discuss the evolution of the NWS’s Weather Ready Nation, the USGS’s plans for its Hazard Ready Nation initiative, what can be shared between the two agencies, and future directions and challenges that we can face together. Specifically, the panel will discuss how the Federal, academic, NGO, and private industry communities can work together to shape and inform science priorities, to develop research, products, information, and communication that allow many publics to make informed decisions related to hazard risks and their impacts. This panel will discuss how to effectively: a) focus on end-users to inform research, information delivery, and communication and uses evaluation to continuously improve; b) increase the capacity and capabilities of decision makers for hazard risk reduction and disaster risk creation/intensification; c) develop actionable products and services that help people make informed decisions and incorporate hazard science into workflows/daily activities; and d) work with partners to tailor hazard and risk-related communication to specific audiences.

This panel will discuss the evolution of the NWS’s Weather Ready Nation, the USGS’s plans for its Hazard Ready Nation initiative, what can be shared between the two agencies, and future directions and challenges that we can face together.