A cooperative pilot project on weather and emergency management decision support

Currently, emergency managers often do not know where to find the right weather information; if they do find it, they can struggle to understand it and translate it to their network of decision makers; and if they do understand it, they may not be certain how to take proper actions based upon it. To better understand the emergency management decision processes and incorporate this understanding into prototype development for the emergency management community, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and East Carolina University (ECU) have teamed with NOAA's Global Systems Division (GSD) and National Weather Service (NWS) in a cooperative pilot project. The foundation of this project is the incorporation of social science methods to learn about and understand the entire emergency management decision process across numerous support functions, not just from a county emergency manager's perspective. This understanding and constant feedback from the emergency management community will be integrated into the development of several innovative technology prototypes. Agile and iterative development and testing methods will be followed, leading to improvement in the emergency management decision-making process. The project is expected to evolve, as future phases will include testing for additional use cases (e.g., different hazardous weather scenarios, etc). Early findings from emergency management focus groups will be presented in this paper. Project leaders expect that outcomes of the project can be implemented to help the broad emergency management community in their respective decision making process.