AMS 2012 Summer Community Meeting Highlights

153 participants from academia, industry and government convened in Norman, Oklahoma for the AMS 2012 Summer Community Meeting. Betsy Weatherhead, U. Colorado at Boulder and George Frederick co-chaired the meeting which focused on the two major themes of communication and partnerships. Several features of this meeting were new and innovative including:

• following up on last year's recommendations, (Betsy Weatherhead and George Frederick)

• heavily involving students, (organized by Betsy Weatherhead and Gary Rasmussen)

• examining—and embracing--social media, (David Green, Jen Sprague and a group of dedicated students)

• creating a state of the enterprise report to follow from the meeting (Joe Friday)

• polling the community for their thoughts on how things are going for the weather enterprise (Joe Friday)

• creating video messages from the meeting (Steve Root)

The meeting was held at the Weather Center, with tours offered before the start of the meeting. Local hosting was led by Renee McPherson, with Berrien Moore, John Snow and Joe Friday supplying additional support.

Betsy Weatherhead and George Frederick led the meeting with a distinguished panel from academia (Tom Bogdan and Berrien Moore), government (Sandy MacDonald and Laura Furgione) and industry (Steve Root and Brian Bell) as well as AMS (Keith Seitter). The panel was asked to respond on progress from the recommendations from the 2011 AMS Summer Community Meeting. Both representatives from NOAA reported that 98 recommendations were too many to handle, although they each had positive updates on a number of the key recommendations. Representatives from private industry and academia embraced the detailed recommendations saying that they represented opportunities for progress by individuals.

Joe Friday led an effort to examine where the state of the enterprise is today, taking close examination of the public, private and academic sectors separately. His sessions presented reports from on-line surveys taken on the community's perspective on the state of the enterprise. These results were very positive on how the community was working together with particularly high marks for AMS and the Commission on Weather and Climate Services.

David Green, Jen Sprague and Tom Fahy led three sessions on social media. Highlights of the sessions included the understanding that in crisis situations social media can be extremely useful—and surprisingly reliable--for two-way communication. In conjunction with these social media sessions, students offered tutorials on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to those who were interested. There were also a number of students tweeting during the meeting, offering highlights as the meeting progressed.

Brian Bell and Len Pietrafesa organized a session on Open Weather and Climate Services. This session was particularly timely because the National Academy of Sciences released the report, Weather Services for the Nation: Second to None, in the week prior to the 2012 Summer Community Meeting.

George Frederick convened a panel on the metrics for evaluating observing systems. The presentations focused on concrete metrics for determining the relative value of different observing systems, including satellite, remote sensing and in situ systems. The panelists were clear to point out that defining the goals of the measurement systems were fundamentally necessary to evaluating efficacies of measurements: short term forecasts, long-term forecasts and climate change were considered in the presentations.

Students were involved in ways they had not been tried at previous summer community meetings. A group of seven students was identified early in the process and were involved in the planning of the meeting: Emma Fagan, David Gagne, Robert Gottlieb, Amanda Ilk, Charles Kuster, Virginia Silvis, Jessica Voveris. Students set up Facebook pages, twitter accounts and LinkedIn pages for the meeting. Every session moderator was paired with a student weeks in advance of the meeting; it was up to the session moderator how to mentor and include the student in their role for the meeting. All student registration fees were paid by UCAR or by Joe Friday. Geonor hosted an evening event at a local pizza restaurant where students answered questions from more senior members of the community on how they viewed social media and their careers in the weather and climate enterprise.

Meeting outcomes from last year were reviewed and several suggestions were made as to how to improve our communication of meeting results. One page vignettes were produced by NOAA staff, Annie Reiser and Rhonda Lange. UCAR has offered to print many of the meeting results for distribution.

During the final wrap-up of the meeting, the community strongly agreed that our common message is that the weather enterprise provides critical national infrastructure for economic recovery, economic resilience and economic health. The community was in agreement that this is a true, easily supported statement that has not been well communicated to critical decision makers.

Full Organizing Committee: Brian Bell Tom Fahy Joe Friday David Green Renee McPherson Len Pietrafesa Steve Root Jen Sprague Lori Bruhwiler James Brylawski Richard Eckman Bill Gail Veronica Johnson Heather Lazrus Matt Parker Paul Pisano Andrea Ray Scott Rayder John Snow Wendy Thomas Emma Fagan David Gagne Robert Gottlieb Amanda Ilk Charles Kuster Virginia Silvis Jessica Voveris Annie Reiser Rhonda Lange Judith Ziemnick Gary Rasmussen