Data Driven Decision Making: Communicating Private Sector Needs to Federal Partners

Abstract Submission to: Innovative Engagement with Communities

This presentation will introduce a new approach to becoming Ready, Responsive and Resilient within the framework of a true public-private sector partnership as the nation becomes Weather Ready in the face of more extreme environmental threats.  At a recent Annual meeting of the All Hazards Consortium Fleet Response Working Group that included State Emergency Management Directors, investor-owned utilities, food, fuel and transportation private sector organizations, a question was asked of a panel of state emergency management directors, “Do you have a plan that identifies your data needs prior to any type of threat and if so what is it?”

All of the Emergency Management Directors present indicated that they did not have a plan (and had not even thought about it) but also indicated that thinking about and developing a plan was a good idea. A core challenge for improving decision making is being aware of and accessing multiple data sources from public and private sectors to support situational awareness and decision making while bringing those datasets together in a collaborative common operating picture (C-COP).

Multiple organizations (Federal, state agencies & private sector companies and Utilities) came together in late October 2016 in Washington, DC to discuss the private sector’s needs to improve access to the vast amount of information available and to understand how to share it collaboratively. The author is co-chair of the ESIP Federation Disaster Lifecycle Cluster that focuses on putting data to work so decision making can become “Data Driven” and to strengthen the ties between observations and user communities (e.g. technologies, research, education and applications). As the NWS indicates about their new Roadmap v2.0, “We can’t do this alone, it takes partners.” This presentation will briefly describe a few of those partners that form the fabric of a Weather Ready Nation and the technology that makes it possible. The private sector is engaging Federal agencies to help them solve challenging problems in the face of extreme weather. Environmental intelligence is at a premium.