2014 AMS Annual Meeting

Call for Papers

The theme for the 2014 AMS Annual Meeting is “Extreme Weather—Climate and the Built Environment: New perspectives, opportunities, and tools.”  Herein, we broadly define weather and climate extreme events to include, but not be limited to, severe storms, tornadoes, tropical cyclones, floods, winter storms, drought, temperature extremes, derechos, aircraft turbulence, wildfires, impactful solar activity, and ocean-land responses (e.g. storm surges, landslides, debris flows). Our society is a “built environment,” increasingly connected by cyber, energy, water, transportation, health, social, and other infrastructures—one that interacts with the natural environment through ecosystem functions supplied by wetlands, barrier islands, etc. The sustainability of this built environment and stewardship of our natural ecosystems are clearly related to quality of life. The theme is designed to explore the aforementioned “focal point” combining scientific inquiry, innovation through technological advances and applications, societal implications, and public awareness through the lens of past, current, and future extreme weather and climate events.

Under the auspices of the proposed theme, traditional topics related to advances in observations, modeling, and applications can be explored. Additionally, the theme also allows for exploration of an array of topics including effective strategies for communication, social and policy theory, adaptation, mitigation, intervention, emergency response, and public behavior or perceptions. Further, the timelines of the topic and its broad accessibility to the scientific, stakeholder, and public communities should make it particularly appealing to many segments of our traditional AMS community as well as non-traditional communities. The theme is most relevant to the NOAA goal and the National Weather Service vision for “A Weather-Ready Nation, a society that is prepared for and responds to weather related events.” 

      As a contribution to the overall theme of extreme events of the 2014 AMS Annual Meeting, the 2WRN is soliciting papers on the following topics:

•     Reducing society’s vulnerability to extreme events through:

      o        Improved communication of evolving environmental threats to community leaders, at-risk socio-economic populations, and the general public

      o        Innovative technologies that enable collaborative environments for decision makers;

      o        Smarter land-use and infrastructure investments that consider environmental risk

 

•     Strengthening business resiliency in innovative ways through:

      o        Preparedness of personnel (e.g., emergency planning, site enhancements)

      o        Protection of supply chains, transportation routes and Fleet-Response for utility restoration

      o        Faster recovery to pre-event capability after extreme events

      o        Environmental data collection, sharing and applications to support safe operations and improved decision-making.

 

•     Generating and disseminating more relevant environmental information for use in decision-making through:

      o        Easy to use technologies and applications

      o        User-friendly formats (e.g., GIS, imagery, on-site)

      o        Impact-based predictions and collaboration across agencies and organizations

      o        Integrated data systems

 

•     Creating innovative public-private partnerships across the disaster-reduction community through:

      o        Workshops/pilot projects and the implementation of best practices

      o        Social media

      o        Research to operations collaborations

We are interested in receiving oral and poster abstracts on both existing and planned capabilities. This symposium will include invited talks, regular oral and postal presentations. It is expected and highly desired that we draw a diverse spread of disciplines, including social scientists, operational forecasters, researchers, communications experts, as well as students and non-traditional partners in disciplines such as engineering, business administration, healthcare, insurance, and city planning.

For additional information please contact the program chairpersons, Douglas Hilderbrand (e-mail: [email protected]), Dave Jones (e-mail: [email protected]), Jennifer Sprague (e-mail: [email protected]), and Ken Carey (email: [email protected]).