WR Societal Impacts Meteorologist

Darone K. Jones

"Keeping America SAFER by understanding and integrating societal impacts into NWS products and

services; to enhance public awareness and readiness associated with weather, water, and climate."

SAFERSocietal Applications For Enhanced Readiness

SAFERGOAL: To improve the delivery of our mission by better integrating the

science of sociology, as applicable, into NWS products and services through:

– Understanding impacts of weather, water, and climate on society

– Providing more effective products and services by incorporating information on societal effects

– Developing more effective products and services through an increased understanding of how society interprets and reacts to information

– Providing more efficient delivery of products and services by understanding changes in society and better utilizing state-of-the art social media

What Does It Really Mean?To best summarize the direction of this program, "Our job does not stop when we hit enter on the keyboard." We need to explore/understand how our information affects society, and then adjust our products and services based on what we learn.

Holistic Questions:

• Should we adjust issuing warning/watch/advisories based on the time of day; should those also be based on population or potential societal impacts?  (Four inches of snow downtown is not the same as four inches of snow in a rural area...especially during rush hour or the middle of the night.)

• How do we know we are delivering our information in the most effective manner? (Product format, call-to-actions, graphics, message delivery, etc.)

• Are warning/watch/advisories the best vehicle to deliver critical information...do we need to change the definitions?

• How do we measure service and effectiveness?  Is it by bean counting, or how much we help all decision making?

The Task

– All WR offices to participate– Equal parts of science, training, and outreach (want full office

participation)– Each office will establish short and long-term goals– Goals must focus on understanding how local public/partners

reacts/understands to a weather situation– Offices must involve at least 1 external partner per topic

– Offices will submit goals by October 1st (Do not want all offices working on the same topic. Will encourage group participation

on an issue (3 office max)). • AND/OR - Offices will have the opportunity to field test research that

has already been done. (Research to operations / operations to research)

Goals, Tools, and GainsGetting It Going WR Societal Impacts Workshop – September (9th – 11th)

– Participants will be exposed to numerous field experts in social science, techniques, tactics, and tools in applying social science practices, and project examples demonstrating process and results.

• The entire workshop will be done virtually as a GoToWebinar with NWSChat chatrooms being set up for distance participation/discussions.

• Hold monthly “sharing calls” (continuous regional fostering effort)• Require quarterly status reports on projects

Parallel Efforts to Aid in the Program• Work with social scientists and external partners to develop an armada of society based

weather related survey questions for OMB approval• IRIS Database, Situational Awareness Displays, NWSChat, web 2.0/social media, iNWS

Gains/Results• Trends will quickly be identified and local immediate adjustments can be made • Distribute findings, develop training, implement well founded ideas/thoughts

regionally/nationally• Adjust organizational service philosophy/practices

Inter-Regional Integrated Services (IRIS)

The IRIS database will serve as an enterprise-wide system to create, store and share data relevant to WFO, Regional and National operations. With a focus on service, it will work with data related to customer contact information, criteria and thresholds, spotter information, communication logs, equipment status, office events and meetings, weather events and storm reports, NWS watches, warnings, and advisories, and verification. All of this data will be created and managed by client applications.

The IRIS Framework will provide a known interface for client applications to be built upon, which when used, will enable data manipulated by the application to be shared enterprise-wide. Client applications may do anything from report generation to GIS to web services; there really is no limit. IRIS will be the foundation for managing an extensive amount of external customer’s criteria for improving decision support.