Implementation of the Impacts Catalog at the Miami Weather Forecast Office

Emergency managers use weather related thresholds to support their decisions when determining evacuation zones, facilitating public services, opening cold weather shelters, evaluating flood risk, and determining staffing levels at emergency operations centers during large outdoor events. The Miami National Weather Service Forecast Office is communicating with these core partners, with the purpose of building an impacts catalog database, which documents effects to their operations, services, and the public. To accomplish this task, the office is making use of the National Weather Service (NWS) Western Region (WR) web based impacts catalog. Furthermore, probabilistic tools are being developed to help forecasters remain situationally aware while assessing the threat of reaching these weather related thresholds. Briefing templates, which are used by the office to notify partners, are incorporating these tools. At this stage, forecasters' experiences along with customer responses, suggest that customizing the impacts catalog from the Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE) is the most effective way to develop products which communicate risk. This presentation will present a summary of the effort and accomplishments, with examples of the beginning to end process and deliverables.