Monday, 17 April 2023
10:00 AM-11:00 AM: Monday, 17 April 2023
This lecture series is in memory of Dr. James (Jim) Richard Mahoney who passed away in September 2015. The Annual Lecture was initiated by a group of his former colleagues and will be conducted in cooperation with the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), two organizations pivotal to Jim’s professional career. The Annual Lecture will honor Jim’s memory in perpetuity by featuring a lecture by a distinguished speaker on a relevant environmental science and/or policy issue of the day.
12:45 PM-1:00 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
1:00 PM-2:00 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
The annual federal budget and appropriations process for U.S. science agencies is crucial to the pursuit of science across the country and the world. This is especially the case for weather, water and climate science and the stakeholders that rely on this funding for life saving research and operations. This session will be a discussion with senior Congressional staff from key Senate and House committees to get their view on the ongoing implementation of the FY23 Omnibus and related supplemental as well as the outlook for the FY 2024 federal budget.
2:00 PM-2:30 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
2:30 PM-3:30 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
Climate change is pushing our planet into a new state, slowly increasing temperatures and related impacts and rapidly changing the probability of extreme events. The likelihood for extreme climate and weather events has been growing, with extremes increasing in magnitude and strength around the globe. Unprecedented events are emerging in recent years, never seen in our observational records. In 2022, extreme climate and weather events caused $165bn in damages in the U.S. Both chronic and acute physical risks have the potential to increase the exposure of people and property. A new climate-aware economy is developing around both climate mitigation and adaptation. NOAA science and technology fundamentally inform our understanding and support this growth.
3:30 PM-3:45 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
3:45 PM-5:00 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
Climate change has resulted in more frequent and severe extreme weather events, posing a significant threat to infrastructure, business operations, and communities. According to a study by global insurance broker, AON, extreme weather events such as heat-waves, severe convective storms, and floods have driven losses exceeding $1 Trillion since 2000. Insurers categorize these as “secondary perils” and these losses largely exclude those driven by catastrophic tropical cyclones. Tropical cyclone losses alone add another $2 Trillion. As the financial community awakens to the economic risks and opportunities linked to climate change, investments in climate adaptation and extreme weather initiatives are steadily increasing. Investors are playing a significant role. In just the last few years, private equity and venture capital have invested nearly $500 million into the top five privately backed startups focused on extreme weather. Institutional investors are increasingly reviewing physical climate risks, especially in the insurance sector where growing extreme weather and climate damages have driven losses. Today's panelists will discuss the challenges and opportunities of investing in initiatives that focus on climate and extreme weather. They will explore the potential risks and returns associated with these investments, as well as the role of public-private partnerships and support of innovation in promoting investment in climate adaptation.
5:00 PM-5:05 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
5:30 PM-8:00 PM: Monday, 17 April 2023
Tuesday, 18 April 2023
8:00 AM-9:00 AM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
9:00 AM-9:15 AM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
9:15 AM-10:00 AM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
This panel will provide insight on the importance of owning your career by planning and prioritizing, and taking strategic pivots when opportunities arise.
10:00 AM-10:15 AM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
10:15 AM-11:45 AM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
11:45 AM-1:00 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Lunch
Location: Cabinet Restaurant (Grand Hyatt Washington)
1:00 PM-1:45 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
1:45 PM-2:00 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Break
Location: Grand Foyer (Grand Hyatt Washington)
2:00 PM-3:30 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Why do or don’t people move? Where do they move to? Who gets to move? What is the impact of human mobility on communities that send and receive people? How can mobility and migration be used as a strategy to build community resilience? This session will address these questions and more. The panelists will share challenges and opportunities related to climate-induced human mobility, highlight some research, law, and policy needs, and explore ways in which we can build the capacity of our local communities to advance their climate resilience efforts, in cost-effective, just and equitable ways.
3:30 PM-3:45 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Break
Location: Grand Foyer (Grand Hyatt Washington)
3:45 PM-4:50 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Educating and preparing students to meet the changing needs of the weather, water, and climate enterprise while maintaining the requirements for the GS-1340 meteorologists is a curriculum challenge. Representatives from across the enterprise highlight workforce shortfalls and discuss recommendations to meet the future workforce needs.
4:50 PM-5:00 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
5:30 PM-6:30 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
6:30 PM-8:30 PM: Tuesday, 18 April 2023
Wednesday, 19 April 2023
8:00 AM-9:00 AM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
The Roundtable offers a yearly opportunity to brainstorm, discuss, and develop provocative and innovative approaches of enhancing the scientific community and expanding the public benefits of science. This year’s theme for the Roundtable will be on how scientific societies can better support workforce development and will build off discussions happening earlier in the Washington Forum program.
9:00 AM-9:15 AM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
9:15 AM-10:15 AM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
This year, 2023, has been designated as a "Year of Open Science”, a multi-agency initiative across the federal government and academic institutions, and other organizations. While this initiative has been featured broadly in other AMS events over the past year, this session will examine the intersection of open science and the weather, water, and climate enterprise and specifically how the private sector can benefit from such efforts but also the potential pitfalls for commercial data and software companies. The panelists in this session will discuss how academia, government and industry could all benefit from open science, while recognizing the potential challenges that still need to be navigated across the sectors moving forward.
10:15 AM-10:30 AM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Break
Location: Grand Foyer (Grand Hyatt Washington)
10:30 AM-11:45 AM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
There are over 5,000 road fatalities that occur every year in adverse weather conditions. As the development of automated vehicles holds the promise for increased safety, both weather impacts on their operations and how we count, analyze, and communicate safety on the road in adverse weather must stay at the forefront of development. Panelists will discuss the role of the public, private, and academic sectors in transportation safety as well as public policy requirements.
11:45 AM-12:30 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
This session will explore the emerging opportunities to leverage new data sources to understand and assess human behavior in response to forecasts and warnings. The panelists will explore potential big data sources and how they could complement longer term data and research on socio-economic trends that are crucial to better understand human behavior in response to weather and climate hazards. The panel will also address the associated policy, budget, training and technical opportunities and challenges inherent in realizing a robust socio-economic underpinning for the weather enterprise.
12:30 PM-1:30 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Lunch
Location: Cabinet Restaurant (Grand Hyatt Washington)
1:30 PM-2:30 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Blockchain technology is being used as an instrument to hedge for weather risks and other related climate mitigation efforts. At the same time, the profound climate effects caused by the deployment of the technology might be unclear at the moment but are not negligible. Panelists will explore these themes as well provide an insight regarding the link to cyber as a whole.
2:30 PM-3:00 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Break
Location: Grand Foyer (Grand Hyatt Washington)
3:00 PM-4:15 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Are our nation's energy infrastructure and operational processes prepared for a combination of unprecedented meteorological events and patterns of human behavior associated with climate, technological, and social change? We tend to prepare for the last disaster, not the next one. We are already experiencing an increasing incidence of “extraordinary” disasters responsible for deleterious impacts on the nation’s energy infrastructure. As meteorologists and climate scientists working in and with the energy sector, how can we use our knowledge, insight, and expertise to better inform government, the private sector, and policy makers on how to (better) prepare for future extreme events that have no precedent in our lifetimes or in the historical record (e.g., Pacific NW heatwave of 2021; Hurricane Harvey; Western Megadrought; prolonged renewable energy droughts/dunkelflaute)? Our ability to anticipate and accurately forecast such events will help the energy industry operate more efficiently and with improved resiliency as we transition to the new energy economy.
4:30 PM-5:30 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023
Maintaining science integrity within Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) weather applications is an emerging concern. As AI/ML usage in weather algorithms increases, tracing the quality of the data inputs in training also becomes increasingly important. For example, what types of training data sets are being used? Are we training on model data or historical real data measurements? Are we interpolating real data to fill in gaps in analysis, without having real data to validate those analyses, and then using these analyses to train our models? This session will explore how we ensure AI/ML is using sustainable science techniques and principles, to maximize the accuracy and effectiveness to the respective end users.
5:30 PM-5:45 PM: Wednesday, 19 April 2023