95th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting

January 04 - 08, 2015

Town Hall Meeting: Dawn of a New Age in Water Prediction – The National Water Center

This AMS Town Hall meeting is expected to raise awareness of the unprecedented opportunity to innovate, coordinate and collaborate in the water sector to address 21st century water resource and management challenges such as water shortages and security, water quality and hydrologic extremes. Speakers from academia and federal agencies (including NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS), the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) will discuss how strong involvement through the National Water Center (NWC) will enhance joint planning and co-development of new science as well as the transition of research results to sustained applications and operations. The NWC provides the capacity to transform, integrate and modernize hydrology and water resource science-based services to improve resiliency and build a more Weather and Water Ready Nation. Designed for optimal coordination and collaboration across the climate, water and weather enterprise, the NWC promotes a total water approach that fosters linkages between riverine and coastal water outcomes. By working closely with the community-of-practice (academia, industry) as well as various regional and local actors (end-users such as farmers, federal, state, regional and local water resource managers, commercial enterprises…) this approach will catalyze development and exploitation of state-of-the-science and infrastructure to enable sustainable solutions. Demand-driven innovation, merging interdisciplinary and new information, will contribute to the knowledge base supporting decision making in water resource and emergency management as well as key sectors such as transport, tourism, fisheries, agriculture, biotech, resource extraction and energy. The intended result is for the NWC to provide the Nation’s most trusted and authoritative source for comprehensive and integrated water predictions including critical data, models, analyses, and forecast information to enhance resilience to high impact extreme hydrometeorological events. Recognizing the advanced challenges, NWC-partnerships are being created to strengthen capabilities and do new things that focus on key areas including data interoperability, enterprise GIS, improving observational capacity, and numerical modeling to simulate hydrologic processes and the water budget at very high resolution. As an example, the NWC will operate and improve end-to-end early warning and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) systems, and make available and accessible the predictive information and related data, models, maps and forecast products for optimizing decision-support services.