15th Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation: Enhancing Our Nation's Readiness, Responsiveness, and Resilience to High Impact Weather Events

Call for Papers

Papers for the 15th Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation: Enhancing Our Nation’s Readiness, Responsiveness, and Resilience to High Impact Weather Events are solicited on the following:

What Now? Supporting college graduate and early career professionals in the field of meteorology

• Following on from the AMS 2026 What If question, “What if college graduates and early career professionals could not get jobs within the field of meteorology?”, this session seeks abstracts that discuss:
  • Developments, challenges, and lessons that employers and employees have witnessed, and what the weather community needs to do to further develop opportunities for early career professionals.
  • Ideas around how industry can support those in the early career stage, but also what those in their early career stage can do to improve success.

WRN and International Collaborations

• Abstracts including:
  • Examples of successful efforts to build community preparedness and resilience in the face of extreme weather outside of the United States
  • Case studies and examples of international collaborations that have strengthened the preparedness, resilience, and/or response efforts of the countries involved

Empowering People through Community Co-development

• Abstracts including:
  • Efforts that showcase participatory research methods, tools that are co-developed with users, community trust-building, and culturally responsive communication efforts.
  • Examples of forecast services and products that are designed with their users rather than for them.
  • Explorations of what meaningful engagement in extreme weather communication and resilience looks like across different communities.

Maintaining a WRN Over Time

• Abstracts including:
  • Best practices and strategies for maintaining preparedness and resilience, partner connections, and community relationships over time
  • Examples and case studies of long-lasting risk communicator/decision-maker partnerships that have successfully evolved over time to fit the changing preparedness and response needs of the communities they serve.

Integrating Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) Information into Decision Support for Compounding and Cascading Hazards

• Abstracts including:
  • Case studies of how S2S outlooks benefit decision-making, coordination, and messaging ahead of compounding and/or cascading hazards.
  • Insights into the key S2S timescales that most influence decision-making, the types of users who benefit from S2S information, and the kinds of decisions that are affected. 

The 15th Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation will also be hosting its annual “What If” session at AMS 2027. If you have a provocative What If question that you would like to propose, please email the Program Chairs!

Joint Sessions

NCAR’s Scientific Leadership: Foundational Contributions and Continued Innovations to the Earth and Space Weather Communities - Joint with SMOI and History

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has been a cornerstone of Earth and space weather science, collecting, curating, and distributing foundational geophysical observational data. This session invites contributions that explore the historical impact, current utilization, and future potential of NCAR's extensive data portfolio. This extensive, high-quality data record represents a vital public resource for the advancement of geosciences and this session provides a crucial forum for researchers to highlight how this enduring legacy of data collection continues to shape the future of Earth and space weather research. This session is designed to invite and showcase diverse contributions that demonstrate how NCAR's long-term observations and modeling efforts have driven key scientific discoveries, validated and advanced observing instrument platforms, advanced predictive models, and fostered collaboration among university and government partners. We welcome presentations covering a broad range of related technical and scientific themes that encompass (1) NCAR’s current and planned instrumental capabilities and the methodologies used for data acquisition and quality control across ground-based, airborne, and space-based platforms, (2) past and planned field deployments that used NCAR instruments and services, (3) novel analysis and interpretation of NCAR's atmospheric and space weather datasets to reveal previously unknown patterns and fundamental processes, (4) data access, and discovery tools that facilitate planning and decision-making during field operations, and (5) next-generation data exploration that focuses on applying cutting-edge techniques like AI/ML to leverage six decades of data for significant advances in Earth system modeling and data assimilation.

Conference Contacts

For additional information, please contact the program chairs: Danielle Nagele ([email protected]), Ashley Morris ([email protected]), Matt Lanza ([email protected]), Anna Wanless ([email protected]), Sean Ernst ([email protected]), Zoe Caryl ([email protected]).