NWS Mission

Provide weather, water, and climate data, forecasts and warnings for the protection of life and property and enhancement of the national economy

NWS Vision

A safe, healthy, and productive society through trusted weather, water, and climate information

The Plan

New and evolving needs from society call for a shift in the way we forecast and warn to provide impact-based decision support services. This means we must place an increasing emphasis on weather-related events which significantly affect people, their livelihoods and the economy. We must go beyond producing accurate forecasts and timely warnings to better understanding and anticipating the likely human and economic impacts of such events. We must enable our users to better exploit NWS information to plan and take preventive actions so people remain safe, less damage is done to communities, businesses, and the environment, and economic productivity is maximized. Specifically, impact-based decision support services will require us to:

• - Produce highly accurate and specific forecasts that integrate human, economic, cultural, risk and uncertainty criteria for weather-related events that impact safety, health, the economy, environment, or homeland security
• - Understand socioeconomic impacts of how and what we forecast and warn to target those at risk and communicate information in ways s. people fully understand and respond
• - Engage with sectors whose safety, health, productivity, or security is at-risk: transportation and public health officials, water resource managers, natural resource managers and others

Operationally impact-based decision support means our forecasters will require an expanded understanding of the weather-related decisions users must make. Forecasters will focus less on improving increasingly accurate model output and more on maintaining continuous situational awareness, interpreting information and providing decision support for high-impact events. We envision our offices as decision support hubs, collaborating with public and private partners, to deliver integrated environmental information for NOAA and other agencies. We envision our national prediction centers continuing to collaborate with local and regional offices to provide weather, water, climate, and other environmental predictions within an Earth system framework. We intend to continue working closely with our public and private sector partners and users, empowering them to gain full value from our information.

Scientific and technical advancements are essential enablers for providing impact-based decision support. Most notably, the planned four-dimensional environmental database, or 4D Cube, and associated forecaster tools will transform operations by integrating weather, water, climate, and environmental observations, forecasts, and decision-making into a network-enabled, continuously updated "virtual" repository. The result will be a common, nationally-consistent, real-time weather picture, allowing forecasters to easily analyze forecast challenges, monitor uncertainty, and make prognoses. The forecast team will be at the center of the information system producing and delivering information to enable human decisions that affect outcomes. Linking social and physical sciences to produce and communicate information will be critical to our success. Next-generation observations, Earth system models at all possible spatial and temporal scales, and advanced technologies will be enablers, expanding capabilities to warn-on-forecast and to quantify forecast uncertainty. These measures will extend the window America has to prepare for weather-related events that impact society.

Our workforce and partnerships are vital to the success of impact-based decision support. NWS will develop strategies and commit resources to train our workforce beyond weather, water, and climate sciences. Forecasters will be better communicators and interpreters of NWS information, and understand the risks and impacts implied by our forecasts. We want to recruit world-class scientists, meteorologists and hydrologists who have communication, social science, and information technology skills. We want to recruit and partner with people from other disciplines: economists, behavioral scientists, ecologists, oceanographers, engineers, health experts, and the like. We want to better leverage the expertise and resources of our partners in the public and private sectors.

The next section, "Achieving Our Vision," outlines the details of our strategic plan. It describes the long-term, mutually supportive goals which contribute to outcomes for society. These are outcomes we cannot control alone but ones where our capabilities can have a positive impact on global decisions and the many challenges we face as a Nation. Examples of such outcomes are defined as measures of success for each goal. Below each goal, objectives and high-level strategies focus on service delivery and science and technology. Many of the strategies support the achievement of multiple goals.