Weather Risk Information and Impacts for Schools Systems Kit

The vision of a Weather-Ready Nation is achieved through the synthesis of the large number of NOAA products and services into meaningful and actionable information for community stakeholders and individual populations. Many community stakeholders such as school administrators find themselves in high-stakes weather-related decision-making situations where they are left to their self-interpretation of forecast information or model output. This non-specialist self-interpretation can be dangerous and may be influenced by source bias, hype, or other situational-dependent factors and lead to decisions that impact hundreds to thousands of members in our communities. This Phase II effort seeks to address improving the communication of probabilistic and deterministic forecast information used in school system closure decision-making with the prototype development of the Weather Risk Information and Impacts for School Systems Kit (WxRISK) software application. WxRISK provides spatial weather hazard risk information customized to a school district and includes features to use pre-existing school communication channels to relay critical weather forecast information to parents ahead of impactful weather events. This software system will address the Weather Enterprise’s goal of public-private partnerships to increase awareness of NOAA products and services and build a more Weather Ready and resilient nation.