Open data, crowd-sourced data streams and data mining large data sets of social media provide users new avenues to procuring data and information to help analyze and communicate weather impacts in real time as well as doing post-event analysis. But how do open data portals, crowdsourced (informal data) and real-time observations and opening up data APIs help data users get to the climate observations they need to make decisions? This panel will discuss how new technologies can be used to make data available, data quality issues and developing tools and products to help decision makers get the data in a workable form Moderator: Nazila Merati (Nazila Merati and Associates PLC)