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Environmental

Information Services

Working Group

of the NOAA Science Advisory Board

1

Thirteenth Meeting of the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s

Environmental Information Services Working Group (EISWG)

April 14-15, 2015

NOAA Complex

1350 East-West Highway

Silver Spring, Maryland

SUMMARY

The following summarizes the Eleventh Meeting of the Environmental Information Services Working Group (EISWG) of the NOAA Science Advisory Board (SAB). Meeting attendees included: EISWG Members in attendance: Ms. Nancy Colleton, IGES (Co-Chair) Dr. Walter F. Dabberdt, Vaisala (Co-Chair) Dr. Phil Ardanuy, Raytheon Mr. Ron Birk, Northrop Grumman Dr. Ann Bostrom, University of Washington Mr. Eddie Hicks, Morgan County, Alabama (by phone) Dr. Peter P. Neilley, The Weather Channel Companies Mr. Warren Qualley, Harris Corp. Mr. John Toohey-Morales, ClimaData Corp. Ms. Jean Vieux, Vieux and Associates EISWG Members unable to attend: Mr. Barry L. Myers, AccuWeather, Inc. Dr. John Snow, University of Oklahoma Dr. Bob Weller, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Dr. Julie Ann Winkler, Michigan State University SAB Liaison: Mr. Robert Winokur, Retired NOAA and the Navy (SAB Liaison)

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AGENDA

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 SSCM Building 1 -- 1st Floor Conference Room

TIME TOPIC SPEAKER/FACILITATOR EXPECTED OUTCOME

8:00-8:30 Meet and Greet All

8:30-8:45 Welcome, Introductions, and Overview

Nancy Colleton & Walt Dabberdt, EISWG Co-Chairs

Adoption of Agenda

8:45-9:00 Update on NOAA Support to EISWG

Courtney Draggon, NWS Informational.

9:00 NOAA Partnership Policy: Next Steps

Courtney Draggon (NWS) and Nancy Colleton & Walt Dabberdt, EISWG Co-Chairs

Reach agreement on approach and key questions for an updated assessment of the NOAA Partnership Policy and its implementation

10:00—10:15 Break 10:30—12:00 Chief Scientist

Engagement Richard Spinrad, NOAA Chief Scientist, and NOAA Line Office Chief Scientists/Advisors

Identifying areas that EISWG can support NOAA science efforts

12:00—1:00 Lunch Break 1:00—1:30 Impact-Based

Decision Support Services (IDSS) Overview

Wendy Levine, NWS Office of the Chief Operating Officer, Policy Staff

Improve understanding, scope and long-term outlook for IDSS. Address concerns over possible area of conflict with private sector service activities.

1:30—2:00 Watch-Warning-Advisory Hazards Simplification Messaging

Eli Jacks, Acting Chief, Forecast Services Division, NWS Analyze, Forecast and Support Office

Provide feedback on NWS’ strategy for developing and implementing its to-be-revised hazards messaging

2:00—3:00 Weather Legislation—House Briefing

Taylor Jordan, House Env.& Energy Sub-committee Staff; Marcy Gallo, Minority Staff Dir., House Environment Subcommittee

Informational—an update on House pending legislation & other activities with regard to NOAA

3:00—3:15 Break 3:15—5:00 EISWG Way Forward Executive Session:

All EISWG Members Discuss changes to NOAA Support for EISWG; Review draft EISWG work plan; Discuss membership vacancies and identify new members

5:00—6:30 Adjourn, Break

6:30—8:30 EISWG Dinner All EISWG Members and Guests Copper Canyon Grill, Silver Spring

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AGENDA

Wednesday, April 15, 2015 SSCM Building 1 -- Room 8331

TIME TOPIC SPEAKER/FACILITATOR EXPECTED OUTCOME

8:00-8:30 Meet and Greet All

JOINT EISWG-CWG MEETING (CWG participation is pending; Webex available)

8:30-9:00 Welcome, Introductions, and Overview

Nancy Colleton & Walt Dabberdt, EISWG Co-Chairs; Holly Hartmann, CWG Chair

Adoption/Modification of Agenda

9:00—9:30 SAB Changes Lynn Scarlett, SAB Chair Bob Winokur, EISWG SAB Liaison;

Informational—Determine impacts and opportunities for EISWG and CWG in updated vision for the NOAA SAB

9:30—10:00 NOAA Leadership Update

Holly Bamford, Acting Assistant Secretary for Conservation and Management, DOC/NOAA;

Informational

10:00—10:15 Break 10:15—10:45 NWS Climate Data

Services Fiona Horsfall, Ph.D., Chief, Climate Services Division, NWS

Informational

10:45—11:15 Commerce/NOAA Big Data Initiative

NOAA NWS Central Processing Portfolio -- Dave Michaud, Deputy Director, High Performance Computing and Communications

Determine where EISWG and CWG can help to improve the initiative. Determine whether to send recommendation to SAB

11:15—11:45 NOAA Data Center Reorganization

Tom Karl, Director, National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)

Informational

11:45—12:15 Open Discussion EISWG & CWG Members Explore areas for closer EISWG-CWG collaboration

CONCLUDE JOINT EISWG-CWG MEETING

12:15—1:15 Lunch Break

1:15—3:15 NWS Briefing Louis Uccellini, NWS Director; Laura Furgione, NWS Deputy Director; and NWS’ Portfolio Managers (5)

Identification of NWS Priorities, needs, and specific areas for EISWG interaction

3:15—4:00 Summary and Adjourn

All EISWG Members Review actions, update work plan, and identify next meeting time and venue

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NOAA Partnership Policy: Next Steps

Courtney Draggon, Director, NWS’ Office of International Affairs and Acting Director, NWS Office of Organizational Excellence, provided an overview of NOAA support to EISWG and related topics. NOAA is forming a NOAA-wide Environmental Information Services Committee (EISC) with members representing each of the NOAA Line Offices; the EISC will be chaired by the NOAA PPI Director. Rob Swisher is to be the NWS lead on EISC. EISWG members encouraged NOAA leadership to provide actionable items to EISWG (recognizing that EISWG also seeks to identify such items/topics).

NOAA Chief Scientist Engagement

Dr. Rick Spinrad, NOAA Chief Scientist introduced the Chief Scientists/Advisors from each of the NOAA Line Offices who provided an update and overview in response to Dr. Spinrad’s summary of the three dimensions of the “principles of operational research,” which include: overarching strategic guidance to the LO’s; accelerating R2O; and the role of the private sector. The Chief Scientists/Advisors from the five NOAA LO’s were asked to describe their respective LO challenges. Dr. Tom Karl, NESDIS Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) , addressed the challenges in providing improved data products and services and how far to proceed along the value chain. Ms. Mary Erickson, NOS Director of National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, discussed coastal ecosystems, resilience, conservations, legislative mandates, and ‘coastal intelligence.’ She also addressed integration of disparate data and the challenges of ecological forecasting. Dr. Franklin Schwing, Director of the Science Information Division of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service described how NOAA Fisheries has an ecosystems-based approach to fish management that has many legislative drivers and employs a cooperative approach to working with the fish industries. Some of Fisheries challenges come from the difficulties of measuring fish populations and patterns, climate impacts, data management, communications, and social science aspects. Dr. Sandy MacDonald, Chief Science Advisor, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), addressed the challenge of assimilating in situ and remote sensing observational data, which today total about 10TB per day. A related challenge concerns the need to decide whether to continue to support a system of models or pursue a single unified (multi-scale) model. Dr. Ming Ji, Director, NWS Office of Science and Technology Integration (STI), discussed the modeling conundrum wherein numerical prediction models are deterministic while forecasts need to be probabilistic. In this context, STI is facing three challenges: how to deal with uncertainty; how to provide impact-based decision support; and how to determine users’ probability thresholds in issuing warnings? There followed a group discussion that centered around the respective roles of public- and private-sector providers in issuance of impact-based decision support services. Dr. Spinrad summarized some common threads across the five NOAA line offices: challenges that result from inherent limitations in both observational and model data; the needs for probabilistic forecasting; the role of (and need for improved) social science integration; and model scalability in time and space. He also posed the question: is there a need for a common applications framework that would support

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multi-disciplinary problems and solutions? Is there a better approach than the current discipline-centric one?

Impact-Based Decision Support Services (IDSS) Overview Wendy Levine described the process by which the NWS is seeking to establish guidance on policies for IDSS services through release of RFIs for public review and input on SDD. They are on the third iteration of a Service Description Documents (SDD) for Emergency Management and are planning on releasing SDDs on Public Health, Ecosystem, Water Resources, and Public Policy. A key challenge is establishing the boundaries between NOAA activity and activity to be provided by the external community, including private sector valued added companies. Watch-Warning-Advisory Hazards Simplification Messaging Eli Jacks, Acting Chief, Forecast Services Division, NWS Analyze, Forecast and Support Office provided EISWG with a presentation focused on NWS effort to simplify and apply consistency to the NWS’ Watches, Warnings and Advisories (WWAs). The WWAs applies to meteorological and hydrological

messaging.

Jacks reported that the NWS has conducted a survey for winter weather WWAs including:

o Focus groups of broadcasters, emergency managers and the public; o A market research firm; and o A random sample in four cities o Organized by WFOs (Anchorage, AK, Minneapolis, MN, Houston, TX, Sterling, VA)

The findings indicated that there is a spectrum of understanding, support for a color scheme, advisories are generally misunderstood, and there is support for an “Emergency tier” for “This one is different.”

Exploring Meteoalarms, used in 34 countries, includes impact and certainty in UK; short focused hazard terms; hazard pictograms

AMS venues for exposure o AMS Commission on Weather, Water and Climate Enterprise o Haz Simp Town Hall at ASM 2015 annual meeting o Survey at “WeatherFest” and conference booth

Results indicated desire for change; results not generalizable, but statistically significant

Prototypes developed

Goals o Goal #1: Improve User Risk Assessment o Goal #2: Expand User Awareness

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o Goal #3: Foster User Comprehension o Goal #4: Provide Maximum Forecaster Flexibility o Goal #5: Enable Rapid Partner Decision Making o Goal #6: Create a Credible, Consistent Framework

Next steps o Spring-Summer 2015

Case studies (WWA strengths/weaknesses) Survey for institutionalization (policy/law) Federal interagency Joint Action Group to be formed All data analyzed and report used in Stage 3 of Roadmap

o Fall 2015-Spring 2016 (Stage 3) Prototype Workshop & Tabletops with NWS Field/Partners

o Timing TBD, as early as Fall 2016 (Stage 4) Internal & Public Testing, Additional Field/Partner Tabletops

o Timing TBD, as early as Fall 2017 (Stage 5) Experimental Roll-out

o Critical Decision Point for NWS leadership

Success will depend upon frequent communication with NWS field and key stakeholders

Questions/Feedback o [email protected] o [email protected]

General discussion after presentation:

Would like EISWG input about the process o EISWG will form a sub-group to assist with the HAZ-Simp process

Questions from EISWG o Q: How does NWS know if the new WWA system is improved? What metrics will be used?

A: Societal outcomes measurement has just begun (per Jen Sprague) o Q: How will the new system account for uncertainty? Will it use probabilities?

A: They’ll be built in. Think of FACETS. o Q: Have you thought about bringing in human factors engineering?

A: That’s a good idea. We’ll explore that.

Weather Legislation—House Briefing

Taylor Jordan and Marcy Gallo spoke mainly to the provisions of the recently-passed bi-partisan House Bill H.R. 1561, and Marcy Gallo also touched on an evolving bill being proposed by Rep. Bonamici. Some of the provisions of H.R. 1561 that were presented include: a pilot private satellite project; enhancing technology transfer; strengthening the role of OAR; increasing tornado lead times; maintaining the hurricane forecast improvement program; breaking down silos; accelerating R2O; improving R&D planning; encouraging commercial data buys; developing specialized forecasts; and developing tools that can be used by private value-added providers..

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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SAB Update In her first meeting with the EISWG, SAB Chair, Lynn Scarlett, discussed recent activities and the future direction of the SAB. Some of the points raised by Ms. Scarlett included:

The SAB will take a more strategic focus (6-8-year timeframe)

Five areas have been identified for discussion by the SAB: o Integrated observing systems. The role of partnerships. New and emerging capabilities. o Ecosystem science and management. o The interface between ecosystem science, management and services, and improved

integration o Decision-support services o A long-term vision for NOAA and the broader enterprise.

The SAB will also be focusing some attention on the NOAA cooperative institutes. NOS Update Dr. Holly Bamford is Acting Assistant Secretary for Conservation and Management, DOC/NOAA. Her title is “acting” because congressional approval is needed for making the position permanent. As prior NOS Director, strengthening relationship with NWS was a goal. Ms. Bamford holds one of two related positions, she manages the “wet” side and Admiral Brown, Assistant Secretary for Observations and Prediction, leads the “dry” side.

Bamford’s presentation asked: The Blue Economy-What is the Future?

NOAA is undertaking a study to characterize the ocean enterprise, which will include exploring business activity in ocean measurement, observation, and forecasting.

The presentation outline had three categories:

1. Importance of Ocean and Coastal Services 2. Resilience is Big Business 3. An Ocean Enterprise The need for Ocean and Coastal Services is growing fueled by increasing population along costs and larger ships coming through Panama Canal and arriving at our ports, sea level rise, and aging infrastructure.

There is a need to:

• Make more Resilient Communities: Ecological-Social-Economic

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• Evolve the Weather Service • Enhance observing systems

Resilience is big business. Tools and decision support is needed to drive action and reduce risks. Business like the insurance industry and shellfish industry are affected. The shellfish industry is affected by ocean acidification and benefited by an early warning system the predicted dissolved CO2

Ecological Forecasting can reduce the economic effects of HAB and improves beach hazards statements, tourism, and coastal management.

There is a desire to provide more services to new sectors, for instance, the maritime economy and shipping could benefit. A demonstration project forecasting Tampa sea fog, helps cruise boats and cargo ships getting in and out of the bay and forecasts water levels for better cargo loading/unloading management.

Is the Ocean Enterprise like the Weather Enterprise with public, private, non-profit, research, academia providing information, services, and infrastructure? The Private Weather Sector is a $3B/annum enterprise. The Ocean Enterprise needs to be described in the same way (Oceans, Ecosystems and Climate) and the private sector defined. There is an interest in evaluating the sector as a study of US business.

The sector is made up of providers (data, infrastructure, services); intermediaries (Walt and Ron suggested the term value-added providers). A handout was provided containing a link to the ongoing study www.usworks.com/usioos. The survey is in progress over the next month.

It was suggested that the seven Maritime Colleges could be utilized as a resource for the survey and more information on the colleges could be provided.

Services are done by the reinsurance industry, in-house by users and by third party value-added providers.

Other questions included

- Where does NOAA get their information. Response: a FACA panel and HSRP (private sector, academic, pilots). Nancy suggests contact between EISWG and HSRP could be beneficial.

- What is your charge? The response was that it was broader than coastal resiliency, including drought and flood, but all water focused.

- Do you interact with other Federal Agencies? Yes, working with USGS, USACE, NASA

- What about multinational applications, like the Artic. Not yet, current focus on coastal and national

http://www.usworks.com/usioos

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- The need for interoperable data.

Another comment mentioned that it is good to see climate listed; since the report is a year out, is there a shorter-term contribution to be made by CWG? Like Tropical Observing system?

Commerce/NOAA Big Data Initiative Dave Michaud, Acting Director of the Office of Central Processing for NOAA briefed EISWG on the status of NOAA’s Big Data Partnership Program. NOAA has internally formed a Big Data Partnership team. The team has laid out the goals of identifying more mechanisms by which NOAA’s unused or underused big datasets can be made available in equitable and scalable means, at no net cost to the government and in partnership with industry. Towards these goals, team conducted two RFI’s on the subject matter in 2014 and received a large number (about 70) of detailed responses on the topic from a broad set of industry players. They held an industry day in October 2014 attended by about 380 people representing about 200 companies. One of the conclusions from this information gathering was that NOAA was quite unsure of how various aspects this partnership could work, particularly the technical aspects and business models. Therefore, NOAA has created a research phase to their program and are currently seeking to establish a number of “anchor players” to create Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) with NOAA to try to get at answers to these questions. NOAA’s concept is that each anchor player will be a major provider of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, i.e. cloud computer) sector and these anchor players will form alliances of other companies to pursue the CRADA. Each CRADA will be transparent and is intended to pursue technical solutions and business models in having industry host portions of NOAAs Big Data portfolio. NOAA is not being prescriptive about which datasets are to be included in the CRADAs, leaving recommendations on this to the alliances. NOAA expects to formally announce the CRADAs, their preliminary anchor players and their alliances in a speech by Commerce Secretary Pritzker at the AMS Washington Forum on April 21st.

Discussion from EISWG focused on how this program is different from the CRADA proposed by The Weather Company a year earlier, and how waiting a year was beneficial. NOAA indicated their current approach is more open and less prescriptive, although some doubt was expressed by EISWG on that reply. NOAA was non-committal with regard to scope of internal resources that will be dedicated to success of the CRADA program. When questioned about data access costs, NOAA indicated that a key aspect of the CRADAs is that data provided under the CRADA must sustain the no-cost NOAA data policy, although players may charge nominal fees for accessing the data, and that such charges may be tiered based on volume, speed, etc. Value added services based on the data are free to charge as they wish for those services, as has always been the case. It was noted by EISWG that this program should be considered a significant accomplishment and success of the major EISWG initiative “Towards Open Environmental Information Services.”

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NOAA Data Center Reorganization NCEIS – Dr. Tom Karl described the convergence of NOAA Data Centers into the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Tom discussed their progress on establishing the range of data from silt to sun and from pre-historic to current, including geophysical, ocean, weather, climate, along with the organization to manage the range of activities. A key challenge is establishing common web site and portal for access to all information and data. NWS Briefing

Dr. Louis Uccellini, along with Laura Furgione, and Wendy Levine Office of COO (John Murphy) emphasized the fact that building a Weather Ready Nation and community resilience is in the face of a greater population vulnerable to these events, and need for more effective communication, more accuracy, and earlier. Consistency is more important than accuracy. The main driver is to provide IDSS covering that last mile to protect lives and mitigate property loss, and providing embedded services, including permanent with FEMA. An interesting challenge was the January 25-28 blizzard. The Day 7 forecast of the developing storm was a remarkable achievement. GFS was consistently predicting signal farther east, unlike the ECMWF model. NWS conveyed uncertainty when talking to emergency and city managers.

Wendy Sellers, is Louis’ new XO. Reorganization was approved by Congress 13 December 2014. The 1% of NWS budget for facilities is an important issue, and collocation with researchers and emergency managers is important as well. Have an April draft operating plan based on the President’s budget. Approximately 1,900 forecasters across tsunami centers, RFCs, WFOs. TAO array availability >94%--a tremendous accomplishment. Beginning to test autosondes in Kodiak and Sterling. 3-4 week forecasts of extreme heat and cold is a new product.

Penny Pritzker is attending the AMS Washington Forum to make the DOC announcement on Big Data/Open Environmental Information.

Science-based service organization directed toward building a Weather Ready Nation. Making progress toward addressing all strategic goals, especially as related to IDSS. National Water Center IOC on track for May 2015. Model enhancements on the way.

Modernization of partnership policy: there is a lot of complexity, don’t go back to where we were prior to the Fair Weather Report. NOAA cannot tailor everything, even in IDSS, so we need each other. The gray areas are important.

Neil Dipasquale, Observation Portfolio--Major responsibilities include radar, marine buoys and coastal stations, radiosonde and ASOS, primary requirements driver for GEO, LEO, and SWx satellite data. The imagery that VIIRS is producing is incredibly important—the DNB for example, fog and aviation

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situational awareness, sea-ice, and NWS is working to elevate the ranking of those instruments (the VIIRS rankings are going way up). With respect to NASA research satellites a challenge is getting the ground systems built to provide low-latency observations that can be used in NWS data assimilation and applications.

David Mischel, Central Processing--WCOSS and AWIPS are major portfolio activities, as are NCEP Central Operations (NCO), national and regional IT, and hydrology IT (expanding to 4,011 locations). AWIPS II on track for full deployment at the end of this FY.

Andy Stern, Analysis, Forecast, and Support--Service requirements go from Office of the COO (Analyze, Forecast, and Support Office and the field) to the five portfolio offices, and are addressed in improved levels of support. For the first time, there is a unified operating structure for the field. This includes an analysis function for analysis and recommendation on technologies for the field. Preparing for the NWS Annual Operating Plan meeting next week. AFS Strategic Theme: Transform services to support IDSS. (Ensemble-based systems support deterministic services): (1) common operating picture (to improve 4D consistency—a seamless continuum of weather and climate products); (2) improve

message clarity; (3) expand mission based service delivery; (4) enable workforce.

Luis Cano, Dissemination--Three services areas includes development of new capabilities and keeping existing systems running. The NWS NWR high-cost transmitters sites are driving cost growth—needs help.

Ming Ji, Science and Technology Integration--Enable coordinated, end-to-end field R2O via CSTAR-Vlab/NOAA Testbeds-OPG for collaboration with OAR and research community addressing high-priority problems. Thrusts include transition/enhancement of operational models, evolving NWS, enabling probabilistic hazard information services, field R2O, and training. CSTAR is the process NWS uses to engage the rest of the enterprise (reach out to the outside community). http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ost/cstar.htm

Dierdre Jones, Facilities--Mission is to provide world-class facilities that support mission readiness and a weather ready nation. Includes collocating with research, academic, and emergency management communities.

There are opportunities for relocation of facilities to emphasize collocation for collaboration. What this means is that NWS would like the flexibility to strategically locate as cross-NOAA line offices in locations that provide improved collaboration, not simply lowest cost.

EISWG Nominations

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/ost/cstar.htm

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During an Executive Session, EISWG members discussed and agreed upon a slate of candidates for EISWG membership. The names and biographic information will be provided to the NOAA SAB for consideration. Bob Weller’s Request The topic he wanted to raise with is whether or not NOAA is doing what it should be doing to derive full benefit from the maturing state of ocean observing and also to provide guiding feedback to the ocean observing system. That guidance could include input on the observations needed to support documenting the state of the ocean, understanding the role of the ocean in the earth system, and improved predictive capabilities. Much progress has been made on the ocean observing system, but it is not clear that there has as yet been a maturation of the capabilities needed to synthesize across diverse elements of the observing system. Nor is it clear how successful efforts have been at facilitating the use of ocean data across other disciplines.