87th AMS Annual Meeting

Tuesday, 16 January 2007: 3:30 PM
Report of Assessment Committee on National Space Weather Program
210A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Louis J. Lanzerotti, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ
This presentation provides the Findings and Recommendations from the Report (http://www.nswp.gov/nswp_acreport0706.pdf) of the Assessment Committee for the National Space Weather Program (NSWP; http://www.nswp.gov/). The NSWP operates under the auspices of the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorology (OFCM; http://www.ofcm.gov/) with the guidance of the Federal Committee for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research (FCMSSR). The vehicle to implement and manage the Program within the OFCM is the National Space Weather Program Council (NSWPC). The NSWP emerged in 1994 from the efforts of U.S. government agencies (now totaling seven agencies acting collaboratively) to prepare the country to deal with technological vulnerabilities associated with the space environment. The overarching goal of the NSWP is to achieve an active, synergistic, interagency system to provide timely, accurate, and reliable space weather warnings, observations, specifications, and forecasts. By request of FCMSSR, the OFCM organized in 2005 a decadal review of the Program. The review of the Program was carried out by a Committee of six researchers with meteorological, space physics, space weather, engineering, and policy backgrounds (D. N. Baker, U. Colorado, T. E. Jernigan, LLNL, D. J. Knipp, USAF Academy, R. A. Williamson, GWU, S. P. Worden, U. Arizona, R. J. Rizza (Ex. Sec., OFCM). Over the course of nearly a year the Committee gathered inputs from the broad communities in the United States that are involved in space weather research and applications, including operations. The final Assessment Committee report contains detailed findings and recommendations that cover research, models, transitions to operations, operations, and management of the Program. The over-arching conclusion of the Committee was that the Program has had a number of noteworthy achievements since its initiation, most of which likely would not have been attained without the program's existence. The Committee further recommended that “the highly successful Program should continue as an interagency program; however, it should be updated and modified as detailed in the further recommendations of [the] report”.

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