This award funds a workshop to be held January 3-5, 2007, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the atmospheric science, decision and operational science, and information science communities as well as practitioners working at the interface between forecasting and operations to outline frameworks for end-to-end cooperation and integration of the relevant systems to improve society's ability to reduce risks and extract economic value using weather forecasts. This will be accomplished via presentations from each community to seed discussions as well as working sessions to focus on both frameworks for major innovations in approaches to integration as well as specific near-term actions to advance work at the critical forecasting-operations interface.
The desired outcomes for this workshop include the creation of a community for near-term and ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration and the identification of key research and resource needs for the exploitation of an end-to-end integration of atmospheric science through operations. This would allow for improved emergency preparation, response, and prevention of severe-weather deaths. The collaboration that may result from the workshop will also have economic impacts directly relating to the improvements in emergency management such economic costs relating to loss of life and property damage as well as value to non-emergency operations such as in demand management or transportation planning.