Decision Support at Regional Scales: Connecting Products and Technologies to User Needs within a NOAA Services Framework (Invited Presentation)

As the Nation faces increasing challenges from extreme weather and water events under a changing climate, it is critical to highlight NOAA’s ability to provide information to meet customer needs. A core group of information providers across NOAA’s line offices has been working on a strategic plan that will strengthen NOAA’s service delivery enterprise. Service delivery/decision support is a social science technology that is practiced differently across NOAA. At the same time, our customers count on these services from NOAA to build their resilience.

Effective service delivery/decision support requires relationships between information producers and consumers built on mutual trust, respect and reciprocity. Key to developing and maintaining these relationships is sustained engagement and collaboration that will ultimately lead to the integration of services into actionable information. Examples are found at regional to local scales, and across sectors. NOAA’s service agents have, for example, discovered the need for temperature indices that can assist Departments of Transportation on their budgeting for potholes and road salt. Additional examples come from the energy sector, where temperature is used to avoid impacts from line sag during periods of high demand.

This talk will showcase the importance of connecting NOAA’s science, technologies, products and services to the needs of the broad user community. It will demonstrate techniques and investments made by each of the line offices to ensure their science is use-inspired. The talk will outline mechanisms used to build trusted partnerships, understand the suite of available information from NOAA, build tools and services that respond to user needs, and evaluate these services to enhance NOAA’s mission. Overall, it will address the application of decision support services as a key component to all technological research in order to ensure our science is useful, usable, and used.