Seminar: Bringing weather services and the intergovernmental emergency management community together to build a weather ready nation

Abstract:

In this seminar, I will review the ongoing effort initiated by the National Weather Service, working in partnership with emergency managers and other public safety organizations, to build a Weather Ready Nation (WRN) (as described in a 2019 BAMS publication by Uccellini and Ten Hoeve). The Weather Ready Nation initiative is motivated by the need to address the nation’s increasing vulnerability to extreme weather, water and short-term climate events. The effort is built upon the Weather Service working together within the so called “Weather Enterprise” and with the Emergency Management (EM) community, across all government levels, to ensure every community is ready for, and responds to, oncoming extreme events. The basis for providing Impact-based Decision Support Services (IDSS) across all government levels will be defined, and successes related to this ten-year effort will be presented. One of the overriding results from the WRN initiative is that the weather community has embraced the need to go beyond simply issuing forecasts and warnings to building a trusted relationship with the EM community and provide direct input into their decision processes designed for improved public safety. This has helped put the EM community into a proactive mode of making decisions 5-8 days before an event such as the current spate of hurricanes making landfall in the Caribbean, Canada and perhaps Florida (based increasingly on longer-range forecasts). This proactive stance contrasts with them reacting to an event after the onset of the damaging life-threatening weather and/or water event. Implications for students entering the meteorological and hydrological forecast community (especially in using physical and social science as a basis for their interactions and partnerships with the EM community) will also be presented. In addition, the need to provide these impact-based services more equitably to the traditionally underserved communities. Lastly the possible relationship of the intragovernmental successes related to building a Weather Ready Nation will be explored with respect to ongoing efforts to build what is being called a Climate Ready Nation in the face of the growing impacts of the global warming now being observed.