Protecting Lives and Livelihoods with Better Forecasting
Weather disasters cost communities billions in losses. ERT equips our partners to proactively mitigate the effects of these storms and weather disasters, help save money for American taxpayers, and reduce potential damages.
Case Study
Protecting Lives & Livelihoods with Better Forecasting
ERT provides forecast advice and interpretative services to help emergency personnel and public safety officials make decisions when weather impacts the lives and livelihoods of the American people.
American Interests,
By the Numbers
$1B
In 2024, there were 24 weather disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion in the U.S.
Our Solution
The NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) is a combined operational and development center responsible for extended- and long-range prediction, monitoring global weather patterns that may be impactful to the United States, identifying and evaluating significant weather anomalies, and providing weather information products based on user needs. It is also responsible for acquiring, processing and dissemination of current weather data, information and analyses; the development of improved techniques for weather prediction and linking weather variability and extremes.
ERT provides collaborative prototyping, pre-operational testbeds, and proving grounds that will deliver accelerated and continuous improvement, collaboration, and stakeholder engagement, ensuring that CPC can meet its heightened mission of providing high-quality, real-time sub-seasonal to seasonal domain (land, ocean, and atmosphere forecasts) predictions and services.
These services cover dimensions of national security that include water security, food security, energy security, human health, and ecosystems/coastal security. The applications of these services include the mitigation of weather-related natural disasters and uses for social and economic good in agriculture, energy, transportation, water resources, and health. Continual product improvements are supported through diagnostic research, increasing use of models, and interactions with user groups.
By prioritizing technical advancements and rapid prototyping in forecast products and decisioning tools, robust data management, proactive outreach, and efficient program management, and collaboratively validating them through operational proving grounds and testbeds, ERT supports CPC’s goal of promoting a risk-resilient society and informed decision-making across sectors.
Our Approach
New and evolving needs in society call for the NWS to shift to the Impact-based Decision Support Services (IDSS) approach. The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) is charged with the provision of IDSS-relevant information and interpretative services to enable core partners’ decisions when changes in weather patterns may have a direct impact on the protection of lives and livelihoods.
By shifting to IDSS, ERT, working with CPC, looks to proactively mitigate the effects of these storms and weather disaster events, to help save American taxpayers money and reduce potential damages.
Results
S2S Predictions, Predictability, and Forecast Verifications
Develop methods and apply approaches for diagnostics and attribution of weather anomalies and of extreme events, including heat waves, Arctic cold air outbreaks, drought, wildfires, and excessive U.S. precipitation/flooding. Additional focus areas include forecast verifications, evaluation metrics and their communication to users, understanding predictability limits, and attributions via process-level diagnostics to physical mechanisms such as tropical variability, polar amplification, sudden stratospheric warmings, marine heat waves, land-atmosphere-ocean interactions, amongst others.
Advances in Improving Sub seasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) / Hydroclimate Prediction
Develop advancements in S2S dynamical forecast and hydroclimate prediction systems, including improvements in forecast models, initialization, and ensembling techniques; the development of statistical forecast approaches (machine learning / artificial intelligence [ML/AI]); and improving the prediction of U.S. hazardous extremes on S2S timescales. Other programmatic focus areas include understanding and predicting drought, flood, water availability, water cycle extremes, water resource management, and using advances in precipitation prediction to improve hydroclimate decision support.
Use of Frontier Science and Technology to Advance S2S Applied Science
Programmatic technology advancement areas include a) making use of AI/ML advances in technology to maximize science usability and efficiency of services for effective decision making; b) contributions towards understanding user needs and service expectations; and c) enhancing service delivery and communication of S2S predictions, to aid decision making by key stakeholders.
● Objective Drought Blends: Integrate multiple indicators to provide a comprehensive assessment of drought conditions.
● Development of New Indices: Created to better characterize and monitor various drought types, including flash droughts and snow droughts, enhancing the understanding of related physical processes.
● Application of AI/ML Techniques: Technologies aim to improve decision-making processes by providing more accurate and timely predictions
S2S-Agriculture Connections and Advancements
Support for Specialty Crop Production: CPC’s focus on specialty and small-scale crop production aims to enhance weather and S2S-resilient agriculture, supporting farmers in adapting to weather variability on S2S timescales. CPC is addressing the needs of specialty and small-scale crop producers by developing climate services tailored to their specific requirements. This includes enhancing weather and S2S-resilient agricultural practices.
Soil Moisture Monitoring: The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) provides high-quality soil moisture data through a network of stations equipped with triplicate sensors at multiple soil depths. This data is critical for assessing agricultural drought conditions and supporting climate-resilient agriculture. Advances in soil moisture monitoring, such as the Upper Missouri River Basin network, have improved the assessment of agricultural drought conditions.
