Coffee Talk: A Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Research and Operations Round Table Discussion

NOAA’s efforts in social, behavioral, and economic science (SBES) are possible in large part because of the passion and dedication from the SBES research community as well as from a societal impact minded operational community. At the 2018 AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, TX, the Office of Weather and Air Quality (OWAQ) in partnership with the National Weather Service hosted an informal “Researcher Round Table” with the goal of opening a dialog to discuss challenges, successes, or ideas that NOAA could improve to meet the needs of the research community. As a result of that informal round table, the NOAA Social Science Committee has undertaken an effort to look at how readiness levels function for SBES, which will be presented at the 2019 AMS Annual meeting.

The National Academy of Sciences report on Integrating Social and Behavioral Science within the Weather Enterprise identifies a need for conversation, especially as OWAQ and the NWS continue to make investments in social, behavioral and economic science. In light of this, the intent of this session is to open dialog and conversation about the following possible subjects:

• Debrief of challenges or success from the 2018 NOAA federal funding opportunities
• A review of reviews: Are the questions OWAQ uses to review proposals adequate? Do they adequately measure relevancy? What are your ideas? Do the PIs feel the reviews provide useful feedback? Do operational folks feel they have the knowledge to review?
• R2O: How can we better work together not only to transfer concrete items, like technology, but also SBES knowledge? How does the operational community ideally want to hear from the SBES research community? How does the research community ideally want to work with the operational community? How can we better work together?
• How can we be more transparent and more effectively communicate what has been done in SBES within NOAA?
• And ... more!

Please consider attending, sharing successes and/or challenges, and learning from one another. Together we will strengthen the relationship between the SBES research and operational communities.