Using Emerging Technologies to Reach Underserved Areas of the Community

On March 1st, 2016 Google Hangouts was added to NOAA’s Google Apps Services. Google Hangouts is a communication service that can be used for multi-party conferences and is supported across various web browsers and iOS devices. Google Hangouts has an enormous potential to reach a wide cross section of the population and at the same time being very efficient and cost effective.

In 2017 weather forecast office (WFO) Morehead City, NC began to explore using Google Hangouts as a way to better serve their entire county warning area (CWA). In the 3 years leading up to the testing of Google Hangouts, 82% of our school visits had been to schools 30 miles or less from the office. During this same time the largest city in the CWA, Greenville, with a population of over 91,000 had only been visited once. At the other end of the population spectrum, multiple counties with total populations of less than 10,000 had also only been visited once.

This presentation will discuss how the NWS in Morehead City is testing Google Hangouts as a way to overcome some of the challenges local offices face to reach a wider audience such as staffing, travel, and schedules. Examples from WFO Morehead City and WFO Pleasant Hill will be given along with some of the lessons learned from each experience. Future expansion of the experiment will include working with adjoining WFOs to reach students that are in the middle of both forecast areas that we serve along with working with core partners such as broadcast media, to have multiple sectors of meteorology represented during one hangout.