Using GIS to Monitor Key National Weather Service Assets Impacting Service Delivery

The National Weather Service (NWS) mission is to provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts and warnings for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy. NWS personnel, working alongside our key partners, deliver on that mission by making use of, and maintaining, a vast array of facilities and equipment at offices around the country. To be most effective in delivering services to the American people, it is imperative that the status of these assets is known so that all can remain in proper working order.

Integrated technologies enveloping the broad field of geographic information systems (GIS) can be used to help the NWS keep track of the health of the resources at its disposal. GIS displays, updated with automated and manual data about NWS assets, such as radar, weather radio towers, observing equipment, and personnel, is an efficient way to make maintain situational awareness of the NWS’ overall system health.

This presentation will describe and show examples of how NWS assets—systems, weather forecast data, key partners, etc. can been overlain alongside each other within informative map displays. These displays show not only present system outages, but also allow for planning future scheduled outages, that may then be able to be scheduled around upcoming impacting weather so as to lessen the impact on the delivery of mission-critical services.