We Can’t Do It Alone: Critical Enterprise Connections Required to Implement the New 2019–25 NWS Strategic Plan

The National Weather Service (NWS) has recently concluded a year-long process of updating its 2019-2025 Strategic Plan, based on extensive internal and external feedback. NWS has adopted a strategic vision of Building a Weather-Ready Nation that ensures all citizens are ready, responsive, and resilient to extreme events. To achieve this vision and to fully achieve the NWS mission to save lives and property and enhance the National economy, NWS will not only have to improve the accuracy and timeliness of forecasts and warnings, but will have to connect these forecasts and warnings to critical life- and property-saving decision makers from federal, state, and local emergency managers to the public.

Importantly, NWS cannot achieve the Weather-Ready Nation vision alone. As noted in the session description, there are gaps in achieving the WRN vision caused in part by lack of inclusivity and cooperation/coordination across the weather, water, and climate Enterprise, and opportunities to better connect forecasts to decisions made at federal, state, and local levels. The NWS Strategic Plan contains three goals: 1. Transforming the way people receive and act on weather, water, and climate information, 2. Adopting cutting edge science, technology, and engineering to ensure the best forecast, and 3. Evolving the organization to enable greater organizational effectiveness. Within the three goals, there are 40 distinct objectives in the NWS Strategic Plan. More than half require partnership with the larger Enterprise (including federal, commercial and academic sectors) to achieve. This presentation will discuss gap areas that are particularly ripe for new partnerships and collaborations. It will also draw on input provided by the Enterprise at recent NWS Partners Meetings in Washington, DC, Austin, TX and Boulder, CO.

Some NWS strategic objectives that will be discussed include: 1. “Leveraging Enterprise capabilities to extend the reach and amplify NWS forecasts and warnings to improve individualized decision-making.” As the Nation’s vulnerability to extreme events continues to rise, demand for timely, accurate, precise, data, forecasts, and warnings will continue to grow. America’s Weather Industry is positioned well to develop new innovations to extend the reach of NWS life-saving warnings through a number of communication channels, while also tailoring and individualizing the information for Americans. 2. “Advance analytics, visualization, collaboration technologies, and social science in cooperation with the Enterprise.” Technology advancements are leading to a more connected world. Machine learning and big data are transforming analytics and the internet of things and miniaturization are driving advances in observations. And, the social science community is better understanding how Americans respond to NWS’s forecasts and warnings. Many of these advancements are being led by the private and academic sectors, and NWS must explore new partnerships to ensure NWS continues to harness cutting edge science, technologies, and forecasting techniques in operations. 3. “Clarify and leverage the unique roles and capabilities of Enterprise partners to respond to the increasing demand for actionable weather, water, and climate information.” The Enterprise needs to explore new frameworks for partnership, looking to other sectors nationally and internationally, while also understanding the relative strengths of each component of the Enterprise. Quite possibly the most important objective in the new NWS Strategic Plan is to “Improve the usefulness of forecasts and warnings for public safety, emergency management, and water resource management officials to ensure planned, coordinated, and effective preparedness and response, especially to extreme weather and water events.” NWS must continue to build relationships with public safety officials at all levels, and better understand their needs, to provide useful Impact-Based Decision Support Services before, during, and after extreme weather, water, and climate events. Addressing all of the challenges above will require the collective efforts of the entire Enterprise and beyond to develop innovative collaborations to realize the best weather services for the Nation.