Utilizing Technology to Customize Impact Decision Support for NWS Portland Partners

As the National Weather Service (NWS) expands specialized support to an increasing number of partners, it has become imperative to not only address partner’s needs, but to customize the delivery in a manner that is most helpful to them and can be easily replicated. In the last 12 months, the NWS office in Portland, Oregon has implemented customized DSS techniques utilizing input from the users and leveraging technology to reduce workload issues as decision support demands increase. The first of these projects included a website created specifically for marine partners which shows a color coded line/bar graph of the next 7 days of weather with thresholds which can be adjusted based on the users susceptibility. In addition, these impact based thresholds have been adapted into daily email briefings for emergency managers for large events including the Portland Rose Festival. Updating these email briefings can be a time intensive endeavor, so automation was utilized to adjust production time of these emails down from 30 minutes to ~ 5 minutes. Decreasing production time has provided an opportunity to expand the number of agencies and events that NWS Portland has the ability to support without overtaxing resources.