Conversations on Consilience: SPC Operations and Social Science

The Storm Prediction Center has sought to meet in a regular way with social scientists in order to address a wide array of issues, challenges, and ongoing operational activities in pursuit of evolving toward a new operational paradigm consistent with the vision of Weather Ready Nation, the NWS strategic plan and vision. This panel will feature Greg Carbin, the Warning and Coordination Meteorologist for the Storm Prediction Center, who will discuss what integrating social science into operations looks like at the SPC from the operational perspective. He will also address the question of how the effectiveness/ineffectiveness of social science integration into operational meteorology can be measured. Joining him from the social science side is Dr. Susan Jasko, one of the consulting social scientists, who has worked with the SPC regularly for about 20 months. She will focus on how one goal of this interdisciplinary integration is to help operational staff evolve new perspectives on current and/or ongoing problems, events, activities, or circumstances; and on a second goal, improving the "goodness of fit" between social science partners and NWS operations experts - that is, goal 2 is about improving expert-to-expert communication and collaboration. One bonus of this collaboration is the creation of the grounds for serendipity - so that ideas, approaches to problems, innovations may arise in the most unplanned of ways simply as the result of the cross disciplinary interaction.