The 13th Symposium on Building a Weather-Ready Nation: Enhancing Our Nation's Readiness, Responsiveness, and Resilience to High Impact Weather Events is sponsored by the American Meteorological Society and organized by the AMS Board on Societal Impacts.
Call for Papers
Papers for the 13th 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:
Special Sessions:
WRN Asks: What If...?
Building off the success of these session over the last two years, this “reverse panel” session will cover topics pertaining to the future of the Weather Enterprise. Chosen moderators will initially propose “What if” scenarios to the audience for 3-5 minutes, then transition to a moderator role for discussion with the audience on the implications of those scenarios. If you’d be interested in proposing a What if... scenario to the Program Chairs, please send them an email (listed below).
WRN Asks: What Now?
These sessions are the next iteration in the “What if...” concepts from last year. Our What if... presenter’s from last year will lead a session on their respective topics to dive into what work is being done regarding their proposed topics from last year.
What Now: Removing the Climate Change Stigma in the Weather Enterprise
Abstracts including:
Sharing success stories and challenges of integrating climate information in day to day operations.
Abstracts providing tips and strategies for public communication, and incorporating compelling visuals and/or videos are encouraged.
What Now: Probabilistic Weather Information
Abstracts including:
Discussing efforts to incorporate probability information into forecast communication efforts, or studying the outcomes of messaging using deterministic versus probabilistic methods.
Abstracts should highlight innovative communication designs and the process behind their development or rigorous studies of message recipient responses to experimental messages.
Strong abstracts will also focus on takeaways for message producers - how can the results of your research or new message designs help practitioners better communicate their meteorological understandings to those at risk of impacts?"
What Now: What are we doing about Ego?
Abstracts including:
Case studies on social media best practices (or worst practices)
Work environment success stories
Forecast busts that ended up being valuable learning experiences either for the meteorologist or a meteorologist's end users.
(Panel Discussion) NWS and the USGS: Cross-Agency Collaboration toward a Ready Nation
The Weather Ready Nation concept has reinforced the NWS’s mandate to provide science-in-service to the protection of lives and property, and it has had profound implications across the NWS and across the core partners that the NWS serves. Like the NWS, the USGS is an agency tasked with providing reliable scientific information to minimize the loss of life and property. With these similarities in mind, USGS has partnered with the NWS to develop its own “Hazard Ready Nation” initiative. At its core, the “Ready Nation” concept centers on partnerships in the conceptualization, development, and delivery of actionable scientific information to help communities be better prepared for hazard events. As the Weather Ready Nation initiative has shown, shifts in the organizational culture and science priorities within a Federal agency may be needed to make the “Ready Nation” approach a driving philosophy across the workforce. This panel will discuss the evolution of the NWS’s Weather Ready Nation, the USGS’s plans for its Hazard Ready Nation initiative, what can be shared between the two agencies, and future directions and challenges that we can face together.
Other Topics Requested:
Community Engagement and Co-productions
Abstracts including:
Unique methodologies and strategies for community engagement particularly in working with difficult to reach populations.
Case studies of working with communities in identifying issues and implementing activities successfully, especially incorporating cultural considerations.
Breaking through barriers to action through community engagement
Merging meteorological and societal datasets
Abstracts including:
Examples of the challenges and successes of combining physical and social science data to produce actionable insights
Discussion on temporal and spatial scale mismatches between different datasets
Benefits of successfully combining datasets and how the results can be translated to action
Urban Heat Island Mapping and Heat Mitigation Efforts
Abstracts including:
Hi-resolution or hyper local detail mapping of urban heat island effects or heat in general, especially multi-disciplinary collaborations.
Details on local, state, regional, or national efforts in collaborating to communicate heat threats and informing decision makers.
Mitigation efforts at the city or county level based and how these decisions were informed.
Applications of various heat tools such as WBGT, Heat Index, or Heat Risk for decision making.
Examples of addressing impact inequities, especially highlighting the merging of vulnerability data with heat mapping data.
Effectively promoting action and informing decisions for during long duration extreme temperature events when alert and information fatigue sets in
Innovative strategies for messaging of slow onset and/or long duration hazards such as drought and extreme temperatures
Alerting/Messaging of Air Quality Alerts
Abstracts including:
Examples of state/local air quality agency coordination with NWS partners
Explaining the challenges of the air quality index (AQI) and how it applies to the public
Forecast and alert challenges during high-impact events (i.e.wildfire
smoke, high ozone)
Experiences in interactions with media, emergency management, and/or the public about air quality
Air quality messaging concerns in environmental justice areas / underserved populations
Air quality forecast/alert success stories
Bringing WRN into Emergency Management: Careers and Cross-Sector Impacts
Abstracts including
STEM and Emergency Management Career Intersection
Application of meteorology and STEM into emergency management application
Facilitation of training or programs with emergency management
Enhancing emergency management through meteorology and STEM-based practices
Weather Ready Communities and Building Resilience through Weather Data
Abstracts including:
WRN communities and evolution of weather outreach and engagement programs such as StormReady, SKYWARN, and WRN Ambassadors
The use of weather data or STEM in local-level community resiliency projects in all sectors (public and private)
Enhancement of communities through scientific data and analysis
Citizen Science and community volunteership in weather-related operations
Abstracts including:
Use of citizen information or reporting for weather impacts, operations, or disaster response and recovery
Use of citizen reporting through programs that bridge public and private sector
Weather and Climate in the Digital Media Landscape
Abstracts including:
Certified Digital Meteorologist program successes
Unique new avenues for weather communication
Success in legacy media (ie: Broadcast TV) in the digital world
Urban Modeling, Climate Change and Sustainable Cities
Abstracts including:
The use of high-resolution building morphology and other urban land use/land cover data sets in urban weather and climate models.
Coupling of atmospheric models from global to urban scales and their applications, including but not limited to those related to weather impacts such as water availability, energy use, air quality, infrastructure damage, etc.
Applications of Generative AI and deep learning models to urban-scale modeling and applications
Applications of machine learning tools for decision support in urban planning, city operations and creation of sustainable cities
Innovative techniques combining physical and data-driven models at fine scale/urban scale
Projects supported by the US Department of Energy Integrated Urban Integrated Field Laboratories program"