The National Weather Service recently completed an agency Roadmap that contains plans for Services, Science and Technology, Business, and Workforce. The Roadmap and plans align with the Department of Commerce, NOAA and NWS trategic Plan objectives and together define an aggressive path forward toward a Weather Ready Nation. The S&T Plan uses a “core capabilities” approach to define the scope of enhanced and new capabilities that are required to achieve the objectives of the Strategic Plan. The six core areas are Forecast Knowledge Management Platform, Situational Awareness, Numerical Guidance, Uncertainty, IT, and the Research to Operations process. Together these place specific emphasis on S&T areas that will improve decision support and user interactions with NWS information.

Central to this plan is a focused effort to advance forecast systems (or environment) in such a way that they fully optimize the use of observations, numerical guidance, post processing and fusion capabilities, along with the full integration of user requirements and thresholds. This effort will support greater capabilities for robust decision support services, through advanced forecast and decision support tools within the next-generation forecast systems. In addition, enhancing the IT infrastructure, including high performance computing, to support the increased rate of S&T advances into operations is paramount to success.

This presentation will give an overview of the overall S&T Plan and then focus on the important role that AWIPS II, AWIPS II Extended and beyond will play in this process. Special emphasis will be placed on how OST is targeting an enterprise solution that leverages core competencies across NWS, NOAA/OAR, Cooperative Institutes, academia, and the private sector.