NWS and the California Office of Emergency Services: Building a Weather-Ready Nation through GIS

The state of California has suffered through extraordinary weather events these past few years, including the winter storms of 2016-2017, the wine country and southern California fires of 2017, subsequent debris flows, and northern California fires of 2018. Through all of these events, the California Office of Emergency Services (CalOES) activated its State Emergency Operations Center (SOC) in Sacramento, and invited the National Weather Service to provide specialized, onsite weather support.

In this presentation, we take a closer look at some of the GIS-based tools and datasets that NWS Sacramento forecasters utilized to provide impact-based decision support services (IDSS) at the SOC. We also examine how this burgeoning relationship has mutually benefitted the GIS capabilities of both organizations.