Round-table discussion on the Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador Program, Success stories, and future efforts.

Dr. Neil Jacobs will present the administrations' priorities for NOAA along with his vision for the agency. He will also take questions from the audience.

The United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, 2021-2030 is a unique ten-year, global cooperative program to expand scientific partnerships to support effective science, ocean management, and sustainable development. National and international experts will be invited to engage the AMS members to learn their science priorities and identify opportunities to become involved in the implementation planning process. The Decade will consist of initiatives to map the ocean floor and processes, bolster ocean observation systems in all basins, develop a data and information portal, establish an integrated multi-hazard warning system, advance ocean component in earth-system observation, research and production, and strengthen capacities, ocean literacy and technology cooperation.  The Implementation Plan (to be finalized 2020) will seek to achieve additional specific results, driven by the mission needs of society and science, and produce lasting benefits. Members of the Decade Executive Planning Group will solicit AMS input to inform the plans.

The implications of changing environmental conditions are increasingly recognized as threats to human, national and international security now and in the future. This Town Hall provides an opportunity to enhance understanding of the nature of these challenges and encourage consideration of ways to strengthen and expand the critical partnerships necessary to ensure that the AMS Weather, Water and Climate Enterprise can and will actively contribute to addressing these challenges.Through a series of paired presentations, the Town Hall will provide an explanation of select challenges from the perspective of organizations charged with responding coupled with examples of how the Enterprise informs their efforts. This approach is consistent with the Meeting’s theme of “Linking Information to Knowledge to Society.” Organizers anticipate addressing challenges and opportunities related to: extreme weather events; climatic anomalies and changes in food, water, and energy security; and extending partnerships with other disciplines and analytical communities to support decision-making.

Are you interested in spreading awareness about climate change in fun and creative ways? Are you already engaged in science outreach and have ideas to share? In this Town Hall session, student and faculty members of The Climate Consensus, an outreach group at Northern Vermont University-Lyndon, will share their experiences with community engagement on this important topic. They will discuss creative ways they have prompted discussion about climate change within the local community and important lessons learned. This session format will include a panel discussion with audience participation for the purpose of identifying creative ways of improving climate change literacy among the public, while also building community across disciplines at our institutions.

Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, which requires all non-sensitive government data to be made available in open and machine-readable formats by default is part of the overall Foundations for Evidence-Based  Policymaking (FEBP) Act passed in late 2018.  This town hall will bring together data officers and policy makers from NOAA, NSF, NASA and others to discuss the impact of the act on data management strategies going forward.

The NASA Earth science flight program is a dynamic undertaking consisting of a large fleet of operating satellites, an array of satellite and instrument projects, a robust airborne science program which advances the use of satellite data, and a massive data archiving and distribution system. NASA’s fleet of 23 operating missions provides a wide range of scientific measurements obtained from dedicated Earth science satellites and the ISS. Projects in development are include both directed missions and competitively selected Principal Investigator-led missions. The Earth science flight program benefits from investments by the Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO) to develop and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies that can be applied to future NASA Earth science measurements/missions. In addition, the NASA Earth science future portfolio will be evolving in response to the 2017 National Academies of Science Earth Science Decadal Survey. A limited number of box lunches will be provided by Northrop Grumman.

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) is committed to producing use-inspired environmental information products to serve every sector of the U.S. economy to enable robust decision making. Requirements from user interactions guide NCEI's science, research and product innovation, and support the advancement of NCEI’s future product plans.To further NOAA and NCEI’s use-inspired mission goals, NCEI routinely hosts engagement events and engages at sectoral conferences to understand and incorporate user needs into NCEI's suite of products and services, freely available to the public.In May 2019, NCEI hosted a Users’ Conference that convened industry leaders from 14 sectors, government and academia to provide insight and perspectives on the use of NCEI’s environmental data products.  This Town Hall focuses on conference outcomes, highlighting common themes and requirements raised by industry sector participants. It will also highlight NCEI’s commitment to making products and services more relevant to the user community.

Forecast-informed reservoir operations" (FIRO) are being explored as an option for improvement of water-supply and flood-risk management, often without major new infrastructure, in reservoirs around the Nation, and greater clarity in the use of the term is needed. This Town Hall provides an opportunity to discuss and contribute to a definition of FIRO that is being developed for the Glossary of Meteorology. The working definition now reads: "Forecast-informed reservoir operations (FIRO) is a reservoir-operations strategy that uses enhanced monitoring and improved weather and water forecasts to inform decision making to selectively retain or release water from reservoirs to optimize water supply reliability and environmental co-benefits and to enhance flood-risk reduction."

This Town Hall will consist of a presentation by Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, focussing on NASA's  programs including space weather and space science in general. The last part of the Town Hall will be a question and answer session with the audience.

At the last few AMS Annual meetings, the NOAA Modeling Forum has been held as a place to socialize (operational) model development and receive community input. This year's forum will focus on progress being made with developing a Unified Forecast System (UFS) for community model development, general research and NOAA's operational production suite. Whereas the actual format and speakers will be determined closer to the Annual Meeting dates, we expect to cover * Progress toward a UFS made this year. * The formal NCAR-NWS-OAR partnership on developing the infrastructure for the UFS * The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and its relation to the UFS

The USAF Weather Systems Program Office (Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Weather Systems Branch) will present a systems roadmap for USAF weather capabilities and programs to interested industry, academia, and government research organizations, as part of general market research and awareness outreach.  Addressed will be likely research and procurement opportunities of weather systems with meteorological in-situ and remote sensing, modeling and high-performance computing, large-scale processing and dissemination, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and forecaster applications.

NASA has selected two Earth Venture Instrument projects for launch in the 2022 timeframe which will provide data of interest to the health and air quality communities. The NASA Multi-angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument is currently in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and will be launched into low-Earth polar orbit. MAIA will provide high spatial resolution speciated PM products over a set of globally distributed target areas. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring Pollution (TEMPO) project will provide high temporal resolution measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde, and other key species critical to air pollution over North America from geostationary orbit. This town hall will provide an opportunity for epidemiologists, environmental health researchers, air quality managers, and other interested people to hear from members of the MAIA and TEMPO teams and the NASA Applied Science Program about the investigations and opportunities to get involved as an Early Adopter.

Operational forecasting and meteorological research that leverages the flexibility and scalability of cloud computing environments is rapidly becoming a reality, and enabling capabilities and dataflow at a velocity previously considered out of reach. Join thought leaders from the private and public sectors to discuss real world examples of success and the emergent trends in this domain. We will be discussing examples and best practices focused on: short term forecasting and Numerical Weather Prediction; empowering statistical, machine learning, and AI applications; ingesting large and diverse data sets; and building scalable, resilient and cost effective systems.

Over the past 27 years, the National Center for Atmospheric Research/Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL) has provided complete life-cycle scientific data management including research and operational data collection, data processing, quality assurance/control, and long-term data archival, access, and stewardship for national and international field projects. Recently, legacy observational research projects and datasets have been added to the NCAR/EOL data archive from campaigns held from the 1960s - 1990s.  With the complementary legacy data additions, the NCAR/EOL data archive has grown to include over 500 field projects and nearly 12,000 datasets.This town hall will provide an opportunity for the scientific community to provide input to NCAR/EOL on current and future needs for field project data management, discovery, and access. This input will be used to inform our data services improvement and development plan. Input is needed from all stakeholders including modelers, observationalists, and current and potential future users of the NCAR/EOL data archive.

NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) leadership team will present an update of status and plans, with significant time for discussion with the audience, which is expected to comprise current and potential investigators in ESD’s programs and/or those of its partner agencies, as well as current and potential users of its products. Highlighted items include status of operating and future satellite missions; implementation of Venture Class activities; evolution of and plans for the research, applied sciences, and technology elements; contribution to interagency and international Earth observation and global change programs, and response to and preparation for community-based guiding documents. A particular focus of this year’s Town Hall will be on ESD actions, plans, and mechanisms for community interaction in response to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Decadal Survey, Thriving on Our Changing Planet: A Decadal Strategy for Earth Observation from Space, that was released in late 2017.

There is rapidly growing interest and compelling need to model and understand the complex interactions, interdependencies, and co-evolutionary pathways of human and natural systems, including the effects of changing weather patterns and extremes, natural resources (e.g., land, water, and energy), economic development, and infrastructure expansion.   Addressing this grand challenge requires convergence among the natural, socioeconomic, and decision sciences. In this Town Hall, DOE will describe its research portfolio, one supporting rapid innovations in integrated human-Earth system modeling centered on open source data and modeling frameworks, HPC, functional communities-of-practice, and collaborative mechanisms. Topics and geographies of interest will be discussed, from integrated hydro-terrestrial modeling to coastal and Arctic regions. Finally, DOE will outline its methods for strengthening stakeholder input (including development of quantitative metrics). Both federal program managers and leading scientists will be presenting with time for audience discussion and feedback.

The American Meteorological Society’s Forecast Improvement Group will host a town hall that focuses on the next 100 years of forecasting. We are inviting visionary leaders across the public, private, and academic sectors to share their visions and dreams for the future. We’ll pose this future through provocative questions about a range of topics including automation, micro-observing systems, cloud and high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the impact of diversity and demographic changes that will play a role in the needs of the American people over the next 100 years. This townhall will allow the AMS community to share their thoughts and concerns about how to prepare our our organization for the future, and the role that the AMS should play in paving the way.

Climate experts from NOAA and NASA will discuss the release of new data on annual global temperatures for 2019, including the most important climate trends of the year, during a combined in-person and telecon media opportunity

The NASA Living With A Star Institutes, sponsored by UCAR, will present a joint panel on the current state and future directions of aviation radiation and atmospheric drag and how to better understand  and mitigate space weather related risks. These include the radiation environment created by extrasolar, solar, and magnetospheric charged particles at the surface through aviation and commercial space altitudes up to low Earth orbit. In addition, changes in upper atmosphere densities affecting satellite orbits due to dynamic solar and geomagnetic conditions are included in the panel discussion. Panel members will broadly overview the current state of space weather risks to our technology from environmental sources and identify the tall tentpoles of poorly constrained challenges. In addition, industry stakeholders will be invited to participate in this discussion.

The National Weather Service (NWS) is undertaking a new initiative to help improve US weather forecasting. This new process under the revised NWS Governance provides guidance to first collecting the forecasting needs from the field of operational forecasters, next developing requirements from the needs, and then delivering those requirements to developers who create solutions to meet those needs.  For 0-18 hour forecasting, however, this process has not yet been fully executed due to a lack of awareness and difficulty in imposing it, and obstacles to change the traditional way of developing solutions first. Challenges arise in consolidating the forecasting needs into requirements and passing those requirements to developers while ensuring this new process does not delay development schedules. The Analysis and Nowcast Branch of the Analyze, Forecast and Support Office is organizing a Town Hall Meeting to discuss ways to alleviate these issues and improve the NWS’ 0-18 hour forecasting.

NOAA's Big Data Project (BDP) has completed its fourth year, come hear how the Project has engaged with the user community and CRADA partners to develop new pathways and applications to serve up NOAA's observations and model outputs through public cloud services.  In this town hall, presenters will provide an update on the progress of the NOAA BDP efforts, including impact on research and applications, lessons learned, and plans for the future.

Leadership from NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service (NESDIS) will overview future commitment in maintaining continuity of core mission observations while augmenting new commercial and technological capability. NESDIS visions an age of enterprise over the next decade through the exploration, development, and launch, of new capabilities both in observation and information systems. The agency is working towards new ways to partner with international agencies and the private sector to make observations better and more affordable through joint development of instruments, commercial hosting and data buys, and launch ride-shares. NESDIS invites the community to join in this discussion.

This town hall will provide an overview of the NWS Evolve Initiative from both a tactical and strategic perspective.  NWS Evolve is a key component of the NWS Strategic Plan and is focused on delivering consistent, collaborated and effective Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) to the core partners of the NWS. The Evolve effort has achieved several critical incremental milestones in the last year.The Evolve effort has significant activities planned for the year ahead, and NWS Evolve will work towards meeting our partner’s demands for risk based decision making through the delivery of IDSS as well as leveraging emerging technologies for the targeted delivery of that information.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Earth Observing Laboratory (NCAR/EOL) is designing and building a C-band, dual-polarimetric, dual-Doppler research radar to fly on the NSF/NCAR C-130 aircraft called the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR). It is planned that APAR will become part of the Deployment Pool as a resource for the NSF research community. The APAR concept represents advances in research airborne radars including; agile scanning and C-band operating wavelength having lower attenuation in heavy precipitation. These capabilities mounted on the high-endurance and high-payload-capacity C-130 aircraft offer a uniquely capable research platform.  The progress to date, funding status and the plans moving forward will be addressed. Community feedback is important for the APAR development. We invite members of the research community to hear the latest news about the APAR development and provide us information about how you might use the radar and what tools and capabilities would maximize its utility.

In 2019, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) established a U.S. Global Energy and Water EXchanges (GEWEX) Program, a U.S. specific, multi-agency effort focused on Federal water and energy cycle research that aligns scientifically with the GEWEX core project of the World Climate Research Program.  Previous GEWEX-related projects in the U.S. include the GEWEX America’s Prediction Project (GAPP), supported by NOAA and coordinated with relevant NASA, DOE, and NSF-funded programs. Initial efforts of U.S. GEWEX may include leveraging collaboration between current agency investments and exploring improving connectivity between different 1) precipitation modeling and prediction efforts, and/or 2) land-surface interaction field campaigns and research studies. In this town hall, USGCRP executive and office leadership and Federal program managers will share early developments and outlooks. and engage with the AMS community on pressing science needs and opportunities.

A growing number of U.S. scientists are participating in science-related advocacy and activism. Doing so requires skills and knowledge that should be part of every researcher’s professional development: Knowing how to communicate your research to non-experts, how to convey credibility and confidence, and having an awareness of how your work might end up in political crosshairs.  In this town hall, attendees will learn these skills, as well as how they can safely and effectively serve as expert witnesses, discuss issues with members of Congress, and participate in the federal public comment process for proposed rulemaking. A primary focus will be on why and how scientists should separate personal advocacy and activism from their professional role. We’ll also discuss how federally-funded scientists can be politically active without violating anti-lobbying laws, and use a variety of avenues to promote evidence-based policies in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government.

This Town Hall will provide an introduction to the GEOS-Chem model of atmospheric chemistry for new and prospective users, as well as an update on the latest model developments for experienced users. We will cover (1) the classic GEOS-Chem model; (2) the high-performance GEOS-Chem model; (3) GEOS-Chem as a chemical module for meteorological models including CESM and WRF; (4) using GEOS-Chem on the AWS cloud. Overview presentations on different aspects of the model will be given by the Model Scientist and Steering Committee members. There will be ample time for questions and for open discussion of model issues and development priorities.

USGEO is the interagency coordination mechanism for Federal Agencies’ civil Earth observation activities, including observation data management practices, the Satellite Needs Working Group and the National Plan for Civil Earth Observations. It is chaired by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with current co-chairs from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In this Town Hall, USGEO leadership from OSTP, NOAA, NASA, and USGS will outline the second National Plan for Civil Earth Observations. Attendees will learn about the major themes of the plan and discuss near-term USGEO activities with the community.