Improving IDSS across the Western Region by Supporting Exercises and Large Events from the Regional Operations Center

A number of exercises and large events have taken place across the western U.S. over the past year including the Yellow Command Exercise simulating a Bay Area catastrophic earthquake and the Special Olympics USA Games in the Seattle area. Both of these events provided opportunities for the local offices to recognize that core partner requests for support would exhaust local resources. This allowed local offices to test the concept of expanding the NWS organizational response to include support from the NWS Western Region Regional Operations Center (WR ROC). WR ROC provided both assistance with the physical coordination of bringing in additional resources from neighboring offices to provide the requested Impact Based Decision Support Services (IDSS), and with facilitating coordination efforts between the deployed resources and the field offices involved. This poster will highlight the IDSS provided, the actions the WR ROC took to supplement local forecast office IDSS, and the lessons learned to improve future IDSS for exercises and large events.