Pilot Projects Underway within NWS to Demonstrate New Service Capabilities

The National Weather Service (NWS) Strategic Plan outlines how services will grow and evolve in order to support the impact-based decision making needs of the nation. The urgency for this change is dictated by a number of drivers including climate variability, water resources, weather dependent energy supply and increased stress on our transportation infrastructure. Pilot projects will demonstrate how the NWS can serve an increasingly vulnerable yet sophisticated user community with environmental information and predictions.

The requirement for increasingly relevant information which can be easily interpreted, received in a timely manner and is accurate to inform decision making has never been greater. Based on this reality, and the understanding that decisions must be made on local, regional and national scales, NWS Leadership has approved the execution of a number of “pilot projects” to test and validate enhanced and expanded service capabilities.

Pilot projects are being launched to validate the ability to enhance decisions and the needs of partners. The evaluation criteria used to select these projects included alignment with NWS Strategic Plan goals, ease of project implementation and the potential extensibility of the project to scale from local to national in scope. These pilots are intended to have clear deliverables and milestones and many will afford the opportunity to foster enhanced collaboration between agencies and partners. This iterative process adjusts the capabilities based upon user feedback.

This presentation will highlight examples of these pilot projects, progress to date and opportunities for user engagement and further feedback.