National Weather Service Science and Technology Roadmap

The National Weather Service is developing a Science and Technology (S&T) Roadmap. The Roadmap will take a comprehensive look at S&T needs and gaps across 22 service areas and enabling capabilities to advance the Department of Commerce, NOAA and NWS Strategic Plan objectives. Each area will have a plan for action and deliverables with performance measures to achieve key stretch goals that will result in reduced loss of life and property and enhanced economic prosperity over two timeframes: for near-term (2016) and longer-term (2025).

The S&T Roadmap is built on a foundation of focus area plans, for science services and the enabling capabilities, covering the end-to-end forecast processes, to:

• help define and refine the science vision for the next 10-20 years;

• influence research priorities and improve research to operations;

• guide programming priorities to achieve NWS performance goals;

• link plans for related science and technology advances to achieve long term goals;

• lead planning and infusion of cutting-edge science and technology and establish a foundation for annual planning, programming and budget formulation;

• provide key goals to drive improvements to science and technology capabilities to maximize societal benefits/impacts; and

• outline the executable path to measurable results.

Key themes across these areas are:

• Integrating within and across systems of observations, analyses, predictions, forecast post-processing and uncertainty information, and forecaster intervention in a weather information database to meet high data volume and interoperability challenges and requirements of the future; and improving interfaces with partners and users from the private and public sectors

• Significantly enhancing the quality of weather information: advancing time-space resolution of information, enhancing forecast accuracy and lead-time, objective characterization of probabilistic and uncertainty information

• Building greater capabilities for robust decision support services, communication and user feedback processes through next-generation forecast systems and integration of social sciences to maximize the value of NWS information to the Nation

• Enhancing the IT infrastructure and supporting more efficient and effective implementation of S&T advances into operations.

Summaries of the Roadmap goals and benefits will be presented along with the S&T advances and identified research needs.