Integrated Weather Impact Team: A Multi-Sector Collaboration for Improved Preparedness and Response to Mitigate Tomorrow's Disasters

The NWS State College Integrated Weather Impacts Team (IWIT) is comprised of key partners in Central Pennsylvania that are involved in the preparedness and response to significant hazardous weather events. IWIT functions as a multi-sector/crossdisciplinary collaboration between the NWS and its partners and aims to sustain a transactional communication synergy amongst these stakeholders - with an emphasis on improving the communication and the usefulness of forecast and warning information for impact-based decision making. By developing new partnerships and strengthening existing relationships across different sectors of the weather enterprise, the team aims to gain a better understanding of external users’ needs while providing a conduit for feedback to assess areas where the NWS products and services can be enhanced. The ultimate goal is to enable users to better exploit forecast and warning information in order to become ready, responsive and resilient to extreme weather threats. To date IWIT has held three successful workshops and tabletop exercises which focused on assessing and evaluating current products and the dissemination and communication procedures of impact-based weather risk and safety information. By developing new partnerships and strengthening existing partnerships across different sectors of the weather enterprise in Central Pennsylvania, IWIT has and continues to gain a better understanding of the roles, needs and challenges that each sector faces in effectively utilizing and communicating weather and safety information. The IWIT meeting participants have included participants from across the weather enterprise including but not limited to: federal government, emergency management (state-county-local), television media and communications, academia, transportation, energy, private sector, health/medical and social scientists. Going forward, the team will continue to emphasize risk communication and look for areas where impact-based decision support services can be developed or improved to enhance readiness and resilience to high impact weather events. This presentation will provide an overview of the accomplishments of this IWIT, current key activities, campaigns, and partnerships and the potential benefits and impacts of this partnerships to the participating entities and agencies.