 Hello and welcome everyone and happy new year. Thank you for joining us for our first briefing of 2022, innovation as climate action advances in weather forecasting. We have an absolutely incredible panel and a special guest, but let me take a moment first to introduce myself and our organization. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. EESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and even podcasts are always available for free online at www.eesi.org. And the best way to stay informed about our latest educational resources is to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. We are very careful at EESI to make the proper distinctions between weather and climate. The fact that it's a little cold here this morning in the Washington DC suburbs is of course the weather that is happening outside today, which is distinct from the climate, which is in areas typical weather. Climate change is with us. The facts are indisputable. Driven by human activity, our planet is warming. Warming trends are accelerating and becoming increasingly extreme. Impacts are already affecting frontline communities and well-informed climate mitigation and adaptation action is needed now. Today's briefing is about public-private partnerships that are helping to advance how we approach weather forecasting and essential capability to help communities prepare for and adapt to extreme weather that is already more intense and frequent because of climate change. Among the climate impacts we're enduring these days, more than ever before in recorded history, are extreme heat, extreme cold, powerful storms, drought, flooding and other weather phenomena. And while a hurricane or polar vortex attracts headlines and for good reason, global warming is contributing to more subtle changes in our daily weather, which are also critical for us to track and understand. Weather forecasts rely on a wide array of technologies from satellites to observe the atmosphere, land and oceans and powerful computers to run forecasting models to decision support tools to interpret and convert forecasts into actionable information. Our incredible lineup of panelists will describe the current state of advanced weather forecasting and how this information is helping us plan for and endure climate impacts. Before I introduce our panel, we will be joined by a special guest. Representative Frank Lucas represents the Third District of Oklahoma and the House of Representatives. Representative Lucas is currently the ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, which means he helps oversee many of the issues our panelists will discuss. And in fact, he is an author of very important legislation recently signed into law that has enabled many of these important advancements. Representative Lucas, thanks for joining us this morning. Well, we can play the video. We want to be respectful of everyone's time. So what I will do is we can come back and revisit the video a little bit later. And I want to make sure that we have plenty of time to get to our panelists this morning. And I'm really given their distinction and level of accomplishment. I am totally in awe of our panel today. But let me very quickly remind everyone that we will have some time for questions after our panel. And I'm hearing behind the scenes that we are having a little bit of a technical difficulty with the video from Representative Lucas and we'll get that fixed right away. But back to questions. If you have questions in the audience today that you would like to share with us, you have two options for sending those questions. One is you can send us an email. And the email address to use is askaskatesi.org or even better, you can follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at EESI online. And you can send it to us that way. We will do our best to incorporate questions in the Q and A with our panelists. And without any further ado, let me introduce our first distinguished panelist, Dr. Catherine D. Sullivan has a long career as a distinguished scientist, astronaut and executive. She was one of the first six women to join NASA's astronaut corps in 1978. And she holds the distinction of being the first American woman to walk in space. Her submersible dive to the Challenger Deep in June of 2020 made her a triple Guinness World Record that's three more Guinness World Records than I have. The person who achieved the greatest vertical extent within the Earth's exosphere, excuse me, the first person to both orbit the planet and reach its deepest point. And the first woman to dive to the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the ocean. Kathy has held a variety of senior executive and advisory positions since leaving NASA, the most recent of which is her September 2021 appointment by President Biden to the President's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us today. I really could not be looking any more forward to your presentation. I'll turn it over to you. Well, thank you, Dan, and welcome to everyone who's on the call with us. This is, as Dan set up, both a timely and a really very important topic. In the course of my career, since I left NASA, I've had the great opportunity to twice have kind of a ringside seat and watch from up close how our weather enterprise, our national weather enterprise has evolved. From 1992 to 1996, I served as the Chief Scientist of NOAA. And then more recently, 2011 to 2013, I was the deputy administrator at that agency and then stepped up to become the administrator from 2013 to 2017. And it's been fascinating to me to compare what I saw of the weather enterprise at those two different points in time. Back in my first stint as Chief Scientist, really we're still at a point where the weather enterprise was still largely government-centric. Pretty purely government-powered with government-funded observations, both satellite and in situ. It's important to remember, satellites cannot do all the weather stuff alone. They're invaluable tools, but in situ, tangible ground observations and ocean observations are also critical. So back then, most of all of that observation support was supported by government grants or contracts. The supercomputers were still largely in the domain of the government, which ran the models and issued forecasts very much tailored towards other weather geeks, frankly. So written in very technical jargon and lingo. They rolled the commercial and private sector role at that time was quite circumscribed. And just how it ought to evolve was a very active policy question in those years. In fact, during my years as Chief Scientist, NOAA was working actively with a variety of public sector organizations, individual companies, and also the American Meteorological Society, which we'll hear more about from Marshall in a little bit. But working to craft some policy, some framework that provided rules of the road and sort of boundaries, government will continue to do this. Private sector will begin to do that. How will those handshakes and intersections work? It became a formal policy, a partnership policy that guided the evolution for the next decade or so. But if you think back to then, your television weather forecaster was getting a package of information from a commercial provider that basically was all of what NOAA had produced. And I'm being a little facetious here, but done up with better graphics than NOAA had produced. It was window dressing on the NOAA product that then came to our television screens. Fast forward to my more recent stint at NOAA and the partnership has really blossomed. It's really a rich body of public-private partnerships, really cooperative joint handshakes that government and private entities working together, as well as a much larger and more diversified purely commercial enterprise. This advancement, I have to say, it's really been critically driven by, it's been enabled and propelled by consistent bipartisan support from the Congress. Support for and recognition of the vital role the public enterprise continues to play, principally in operating the observational infrastructure, but real commitment to incentivizing and encouraging the public and private sector to work cooperatively together for the greater good of the American people and our economy. So the value chain that I'm talking about here is to be clear, I've mentioned observations, satellite and in situ, ground-based and oceanic. Then there is the modeling enterprise, supercomputers and very advanced models of the physics of how the earth works basically. And then the other segment that's grown so rapidly between my first stint at NOAA and my second is what I would call value-added products and services. As my time at NOAA administrator, I really termed this whole portion of the enterprise as environmental intelligence. And it's no longer provided even NOAA does a better job now of putting out its information in language and formats that are leaning towards the decision makers that are oriented towards you as a citizen or the head of a company needing to hear a forecast, understand the implications of that forecast for their community or for their business and have it really mesh into their world, mesh into their decision framework so that they can act on it. So environmental intelligence in my parlance, it's timely information, it's actionable in your domain and it's tailored to the decisions that you are wrestling with. The whole point here is to give all of us foresight, a reliable actionable sense of what's around the corner, 24, 48, 72 hours or week in advance so that we can plan, prepare, anticipate, preserve and protect lives and property and sustain the vibrancy of our economy. There's today really exciting ways of innovation happening across that entire value chain as computing power has decentralized, every university now has massive supercomputers. Our desktop computers are more powerful than anything we had on the space shuttle back one. And that has allowed portions of this work, the computational and analytical part to disseminate out to many, many more players. And that is a wonderful way to foster more innovation. So we're really in a domain where we've got a very open innovation platform of the public domain data that anybody from a graduate student to a startup company can reach into and think about creating new products, new services, new insights that will protect lives property in our economy. Some of the things that excite me in the innovation space are the development of smaller satellites, smaller satellites and the shrinkage of sensors, the sensors we need to measure the atmospheric properties. Those are also being compacted with miniaturization and modern technology, which means we can have more observations more frequently, lower latency, more timely raw data coming into the modeling enterprise. That's gonna be a real linchpin to some of the future advances. The cadence of the observations will go up, the volume of data will go up. And when you then accompany that with analytics and forecast capabilities that are augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning, I think there's a very exciting new domain opening in front of us. And the final piece of that chain has been the evolution of the user interfaces. The ways you and I or a small company or county or city government can access this information. The growth in powerful and flexible tail or readily tailored user interfaces means we're shortening and speeding up the link from the observation to the user that needs that insight. So we're at a very exciting point in time. Again, much of this progress has been both supported and encouraged by the Congress and by the bipartisan support that this enterprise has long enjoyed and may that climate, may that political climate long endure. So Dan, let me pause there and move on to our next guest. Awesome. Thank you so much for that tremendous kickoff to our panel today. And I have been, we have worked out the technical issue with Representative Lucas. So before I introduce our next speaker, I would like to pause for just a moment. We will show his video. He, Representative Lucas, like I said before, is ranking member on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. And he's been very instrumental in many of the laws that have been enacted that have enabled many of these important advancements. So let me pause there and we will welcome Representative Lucas into our briefing today. Hello, I'm Frank Lucas, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Thank you for inviting me to address you today and for taking part in this important briefing. Oklahomans like myself grow up understanding the danger of extreme weather like tornadoes. And no state in our nation is immune to the tough weather events from Mother Nature. Some of the most important tools we have to protect against disaster are NOAA's weather prediction capacities. They do exceptional work that has saved countless lives. But great success is rarely achieved alone and extreme weather prediction is no different. It's a team effort with NOAA's efforts bolstered by data provided by private companies. In 2017, my bipartisan weather act was signed into law, sparking a concerted effort to get private industry involved in federally funded weather forecasting. Since then, a true success story in scientific progress has unfolded. Weather forecasting is getting better and better thanks to the expansion of commercial data use. As unique capacities of private companies are combined with NOAA's world-leading earth and space-based technologies, these commercial data buy programs are ongoing today. And as a result, Americans can depend on ever-improving, life-saving weather prediction resources. I'm thrilled that thanks to the work of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, NOAA has continued to receive annual increases in appropriations dedicated to commercial data buys. This is a golden opportunity to further protect lives and property in the face of extreme weather. And I have no doubt that the expanded role of private industry will help us achieve this goal. I look forward to hearing ideas from today's event on how to involve more commercial data providers as we grow federal support for these programs and how we can continue to better utilize the unique capacities of private companies. Thank you again for taking part in this important event. This is a particularly timely topic and I'm excited to see where public-private partnerships will take us in the next generation of weather forecasting. Thanks very much to Representative Lucas and his great staff on the House Science Committee for helping make him available to share his thoughts with us today. And apologies to them as well for the technical hiccup, but really, really great to have them join us today. Our second panelist is Rear Admiral Tim Gallaudet, now retired from the Navy. He's the CEO of Ocean STL Consulting and host of the Blue America, Blue Economy podcast. Tim previously served as the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere within the U.S. Department of Commerce. In this function, he fulfilled the role of acting under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and Acting Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration until February 2019. He serves on the board of directors for Force Blue and he's a strategic advisor for Tomorrow.io, who's Allen Hamilton, his own space systems, just to name a few. Tim is an associate editor for artificial intelligence for the Earth Systems Journal of the American Meteorological Society and a member of the Society, Marine Technology Society and the Association of Unmanned Systems International among many other distinguished groups. Tim, thank you very much for joining our panel today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation as well. Take it away. Hey Dan, thanks very much. Let me take the screen over here. And let me also say thanks to Kathy. I followed Kathy at NOAA and she left in place such a great team and it was really the highlight of my career to be a part of that fantastic organization. And so, but I'm gonna focus my remarks today more on my previous experience in my career and that was what I did in the military. So let me get this in presentation mode here and do a quick check with you, Dan. Does that look like everything's on tap here? Looks real good. Fantastic. All right, so I'm gonna talk a bit about weather forecasting and climate prediction and projections and the influence and impact on the US military and specifically about the military's job to fight our nation's wars. And really to be so good at that that we never even have to go to war again. That's all the point of really a capable US military. And so as this slide depicts, a big focus now is the Indo-Pacific and there is weather in the Indo-Pacific. So having the forecast right matters quite a bit. So first off, a kind of a little sea story. My job in the Navy, I was the oceanographer of the Navy. And then that meant I was in charge of all the operational weather and ocean forecasters in that service. And the job description can be put in a pretty succinct way of what we did for the Navy. If anyone saw master and commander, there was this term that used in the movie but also applied throughout the age of sail called the weather gauge. And it meant that in any combat action with ships of the line in the age of sail from the Royal Navy to the early American Navy, having the weather gauge meant being upwind of the adversary. And because everything was controlled by the sail, being upwind gave you a weather gauge or an advantage. And so weather mattered back then and it matters now in the 21st century, but it's not just weather. It's the entire four-dimensional environment that goes from sea floor to the sun. And so that's what we provided the Navy, the weather gauge of the 21st century. And now in modern war fighting with all services, I'm gonna show you that it's more important ever to have that weather gauge. So first off, let's look at the broad climate context right now, but we know well that the increasing intensity of storms and climate impacts is affecting us nationally, but it's really an international issue as well and it's a national security issue. And here are just some examples. Flooding in the US affects military bases and their readiness. Fish stocks are moving north and that's a national security issue because so many countries depend on fisheries for the livelihood and so that could be destabilizing as fish stocks decline. Water scarcity in the Middle East has been shown to be a factor into the unrest in Syria. And as one of many examples, as well as extreme drought and you get the picture. And also the Arctic is one area that's changing faster than anywhere. And you see Russia working to capitalize that, capitalize on that by using the northern sea route. And that's just creating a whole new power dynamic in the high north. So there's a climate impacts are affecting all DOD missions from the tactical to the strategic level. And so the department has recognized this and they've released a climate adaptation plan you see here which is part of a larger suite of agency and department climate action plans that the Biden administration has put forward. And it's interesting because I did work as the ocean art of the Navy and the Obama administration and I remember doing very similar work with some of the same players that are leading these efforts now. And so why, some of the key elements in these plans is addressing base resilience, why? Because you have things like this. Tyndall Air Force Base suffering $4.7 billion of damage due to hurricane Michael in 2018. And so I mean, that is enough said here but there are others. This is off at Air Force Base and you see half of that runway being underwater from the Missouri rivers flooding in 2019. This is the headquarters of US strategic command not a good situation for the headquarters of such a global important command. And then you have what here in Norfolk Naval Base this is a three time a year occurrence flooding like this. And this is not a picture of the base. This is a picture of one of the roads to the base in Norfolk. I show it because what really affects the base and its readiness is not necessarily the piers they're not being submerged where the ships are alongside it's all the thousands of sailors that need to get to the ships that live in the city and can't get there during situations like this. And this happened several times a year in the city of Norfolk. So big climate impacts like this are being addressed by the climate adaptation plan of the department. And another piece is the weather component of this. Like for example, this was 2021 a tornado striking down at the submarine base in Georgia. I'll tell you what, if there were a nuclear powered submarine pier side that couldn't get underway because it was being refit and one of these touched down I wouldn't want that situation to happen if I were the base commander or the submarine force commander and you get the picture. So readiness critical to it as understanding and being able to predict weather events. Now, something I thought that needed more emphasis in the adaptation plan was this it's the tactical to operational side rather than strategic. And so this is an article I've published in real clear defense this year where I talked about that. And what I referred to is this change in modern war fighting concepts of very recent. This is general height in the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a friend of mine I got to know in a previous tour and he talked about a war game last year where the scenario was defending Taiwan against the China invasion. And you read the words here it didn't go well for us because we were operating on our traditional doctrine of concentrating forces heavily dependent upon command and control. Well, the command and control was taken out and the concentration of our forces led to a single point of failure and we lost. So to overcome that, the USDOD has adopted new war fighting concepts. And here are sort of the big four from the top left distributing the force more across a wider area making them not subject to a single mission kill. Joint all-domain operations meaning things like operating in the littorals of one element of the force and maybe in the deep ocean including the interior and maybe even up in the high north of the Arctic. You have technologies like unmanned systems or uncrewed systems that are more weather dependent. And then of course information warfare which environmental intelligence is really the other term for that. All of these sort of point to the fact the military is going to be increasingly dependent or is now on higher precision weather information with longer lead forecast times over a wider area. So the need is just greater than it's ever been. Now, how are we going to solve that? Much like Kathy talked to and representative Lucas we have the private sector stepping up. This is a friend of mine, a meteorologist Dr. Kelvin Drogmeyer, former White House science advisor and he talked about embracing and advancing this idea that the private sector is bringing new capabilities to the fore. And just like he talks about the Sputnik launch that the government responded to with our space program. Well, today that's happening in the private sector with companies like SpaceX. And we are seeing the same in a weather. And so for example, this is just a little bit of a snapshot of what's out there. We have the remote sensing and in situ sensing capabilities, satellite based and ocean and terrestrial based with companies like Sofar. We have tomorrow IO for example with one of the highest ends weather intelligence platforms. And then there are others too that you see the private sector has the capability and has it now. And I'm really excited to advance that offering to the U.S. Department of Defense as we move forward in 2022. Thanks for having me Dan. And I look forward to everybody's questions. I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you, sir for that fantastic presentation. And Tim, you just presented a lot of really great slides. I just would like to make a reminder everything from our briefing today, including the archived webcast, presentation materials, other links will be available for free online at www.psi.org. So if you'd like to go back and watch Kathy's presentation or review Tim's slides there's a very easy way to do that. And the same thing of course goes to our next two panelists as well. Also lots of really fascinating topics addressed so far if people in our audience today have questions there are two ways they can share those questions with us and we'll do our best to incorporate them into the discussion. The first is by sending us an email askASK at EESI.org where you can follow us online at EESI online on Twitter. It is my privilege to introduce our third panelist today. Dr. J. Marshall Shepherd is a leading international expert on weather and climate and is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia. Marshall was the 2013 President of the American Meteorological Society nation's largest and oldest professional science society and atmospheric and related scientists. He serves as the director of the University of Georgia's Atmospheric Sciences Program and full professor in the Department of Geography where he was a previous associate department head. Marshall, welcome to our briefing today. I will turn it over to you. I'm really looking forward to your presentation as well. I say that a lot. I'm really looking forward to these presentations. They've been fabulous. Thank you. Thank you so much. I wanna get this screen set up here and can you see my slides? It looks great. Very good. So I'm foregoing a nice meal at one of my favorite Thai restaurants today to take my lunch to come speak to you about a topic that's very pressing in society today. I wanna address the extreme weather climate gap. It's a topic that I've been talking about in the last few years or so and implications of what that gap means for vulnerable and marginalized communities. There you see my coordinates and perspectives here represent my perspective and not any of my employers or affiliated organization. Gilbert White is a noted geographer that said the gap between the rich and poor is growing among and within most nations. He also noted that global environment shows signs of widespread deterioration. Both natural and social environments are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbances. If you were watching the news just this week or in the past seven days, Noah issued a report noting that we saw a tremendous number of billion dollar events in the past year. In fact, I believe it was the third costly is from an extreme weather disaster perspective. This is our reality and we know that it's driven strongly by our changing climate. Along with these increased weather climate extremes, we still have an income gap, a wealth gap. I worked for 12 years as a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, but this isn't rocket science. The vulnerabilities associated with extreme weather are directly related to this gap. You can see it very clearly here when you look at income of various demographic groups. What this means if I translate it is if we're talking about communities in New Orleans facing a hurricane Ida or a community perhaps in New York City facing a three-inch per hour rainstorm as we saw with the remnants of hurricane Ida. Some groups have more economic resilience to withstand that weather disaster. Myself, I can take my family and move inland and stay in a hotel for five days of the hurricane's approaching. Many people don't have that option and they have to stay and that's vulnerability. Many of the people that were impacted by flooding in New York City were marginalized in poor communities living in perhaps housing that was inadequate to withstand the new realities of the weather that we're facing today. I sat before the House Science Committee two years ago. Some of you were likely in the room and I said at that time that the extremes are becoming more extreme and people feel them more than averages. We often talk about climate change in terms of averages and the average temperature or keeping the average warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And by the way, we need to speak the language of Americans. We don't speak Celsius in this country. We speak Fahrenheit. 1.5 degrees C is closer to three degrees Fahrenheit. I think that resonates with people in this country but nevertheless, these extremes and I was co-author on a National Academy's report on attribution of extreme weather, the climate change. The DNA of climate change is very much in today's heatwaves, floods, drought and aspects of hurricanes. And that's important to understand as we move forward. Now, I write for Forbes, I'm a senior contributor and I recently wrote a column, three questions about climate change that need to disappear in the year 2020. And one is that I get from reporters and people all the time, are we in a new normal climate? Yes, we are. I paused it here for emphasis because it's not a new normal. It's our normal now. And I think we have to sort of calibrate ourselves to understand that this is our normal. It's not a new normal. I often get, well, what do you think that this is the warmest year or the fourth warmest year on record or this or that? I said, that's not breaking news anymore. Those aren't the news stories we need to be telling. We need to be telling stories of how climate change is impacting your constituents, kitchen, table, lives, their health care, the economy, national security, as Tim just talked about, agricultural productivity, our infrastructure. These are the things that matter to Americans. I can talk about polar bears and trend lines and sensitivity studies of carbon dioxide until I turn blue. That doesn't resonate with my cousin. They wanna know how the price of cereal or the cost of gas or the resiliency of their power grid if there's a storm, how it's going to hold up. These are the kitchen table issues. Those are the stories, not this constant drone or this is the warmest year. That's the new normal that we're in. And I get the question, are we acting fast enough? We aren't, we have to, we need an operation work speed. And I, Tim, Kathy and I, and I wrote an article in their Washington Post recently talking about the need for operation work speed level, Apollo level action on climate change. Just to give you a sense of where we are because there was a lot of talk recently about tornadoes. We had some devastating tornadoes in December. They're not common in December, but they do happen. It's important to note from that National Academy study that I mentioned earlier, this is where we are on our understanding of climate change coupling to extreme weather events. The decline in extreme cold events, increases in extreme heat drought and extreme rainfall. We have pretty good confidence the DNA of climate change is in those. When we come down here to severe convective storms like tornadoes, I'm not saying that climate change is not affecting tornadic storm. I'm saying we don't have enough conclusive evidence to make some of the connections that I saw being made. And so we have to be careful with those types of things because it undermines the very clear signals that we do have in our understanding of how climate change is affecting extreme weather. So I wanna kinda start to wrap up here with something that my good colleague, Robert Bullard, the father of the modern environmental justice movement said, I wanna point to this sentence here. Today's zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and wealth being. It he says individuals who physically live on the wrong side of the tracks are subjected to elevated health threats and their fair share or more than of preventable disease. This is the environmental justice lend when we place toxic factories or landfills in poor or communities of color. That's environmental injustice. We're seeing climate injustice now with this disproportionate impact of climate on citizens. And so I often call this and others have referred to it as the weather climate gap. There's a disproportionate sensitivity to extreme weather climate events and the delay in the ability to bounce back. This is some work that I've done over the years looking at the Atlanta urban heat island. There's the Atlanta urban heat island. We know that it's warmer in the cities because of all the asphalt and lack of trees and so forth. And you couple that with a broader climate change and heat waves that happen every summer. But what we're also finding is that people of color and poor communities are disproportionately exposed to that heat island. The national climate assessment report tells us similar things about all aspects of extreme weather. This was in the most recent 2018 report. We have the new and forthcoming communities of color, children, older adults, low income communities, all disproportionately impacted and vulnerable because there's lack of resilience near adaptive capacity and greater sensitivity for the reasons that I've mentioned. There may be even a weather gap. This was a graphic produced by Jack Silla and a student at Cornell University showing them South. There may be gaps in radar coverage and some of those gaps fall on areas where there are significant black populations or communities of color. Now, again, don't overread this because we know that we have good coverage but we still know that there are gaps. I mean, there are gaps here in Northeast Georgia and parts of North Carolina and so forth as well. And so we just have to be aware of this ability to warn about these types of events to all people even in how we communicate. There are studies that suggest that multilingual or Spanish speaking residents and citizens of our country may not get warnings in the same way that we intend them because of translation issues. So our conundrum as I close, excuse me, we can land on Mars but people still languish without power after a hurricane or a winter storm. A colleague Ian Germanico is an expert in housing resilience and he said something a while ago that resonated with me. Being proactive with resilience has shown to have a 10 to one return on reduction losses from catastrophic events. Yep, we still tend to be reactionary. After a hurricane, Sandy or Katrina, we do things. We need to take more of a proactive approach and perhaps that involves working with public private partners, the American Meteorological Society and Industry and the academic sector as well. So what we need now for my perspective is we need increasing resilience across all infrastructure sectors. We need a work speed or Apollo effort for climate crisis marginalized poor and people of color suffer disproportionately from extreme weather events and we need to recognize that weather climate gap and we need a weather, water and climate enterprise scaled for the 21st century normals and the five pre-peas prior planning prevents poor performance. Thank you. I want to at least close by pointing out, I don't have time to go into it but I'm many of you aware of a new NOAA decadal weather research report. In fact, I think it was commissioned by Congress. I happened to be involved a little bit with that report and this was a list of the top actions from that report that that committee dug into on behalf of the NOAA Science Advisory Board which I happened to serve on under Cathy's leadership of NOAA. Thank you. Thank you Marshall for that fantastic presentation and I know our topic today is advanced weather forecasting but I really appreciated how much of what you said today applies to sort of so many other facets of climate action and I know I'll definitely be revisiting your presentation today and I learned a lot and a great reminder also to use language that people can understand and while Celsius works for most places, it's a good reminder that we should make sure that we make this relatable and understandable and resonant for people in the United States to understand. So thank you so much for that. And as a reminder, if anyone else would like to go back and revisit Marshall's presentation, everything including his presentation materials and the archived webcast will be available online at www.nesi.org. It is my privilege to introduce our fourth and final panelists today. Thomas Kavett is the director of business operations space at Tomorrow IO, a weather technology company where he leads the strategy and operations of the space and government teams as well as their government relations team focused on policy engagement. Thomas is a former strategy consultant at the McKinsey and company where he worked across a variety of industries including medical device manufacturing, mining, cybersecurity, private equity and advanced industrial services. Thomas, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks Dan. I feel like I'm probably the least qualified to be here on the panel but I'm excited to be here and talk to you guys about for the last year or so since we announced our space program, I've been working alongside our engineering team to kick that off. I'm excited today to talk to you about the innovation that we're driving not just in space and space-based weather observations but really across the entire value chain. So let me just share my screen quickly. And Dan, can you guys see this? It looks great. Great. All right, so, oh no, now it's not letting me change slides. Here we go. So tomorrow.io, we are a weather intelligence company and what that means is we're bringing really actionable decision-making tools to governments, businesses and individuals all around the world really to improve their climate security and improve their ability to address extreme weather. We're founded in 2016 by a group of military aviators who said look and special operators who said, no, the weather forecast is not built in a way that allows us to make good decisions and we need to change that. So we're a Boston based company but we have offices all over the world and we're one of the fastest growing companies in the weather industry. One thing I'll point out on this slide is you can see really the diversity of customers that we serve, ranging from government agencies, cities and municipalities, commercial airlines, electric providers, restaurants, everything in between. And what we're seeing is our customers are waking up to the fact that they need better tools to make day-to-day operational decisions based on extreme weather. And we're also heavily partnered with the federal government. Agencies like the US Air Force is supporting our space program. We're the chief architect for NOAA's Epic Program helping to modernize their numerical weather prediction systems. We also support R&D with NASA around urban unmanned aerial systems. And we're a weather ready nation ambassador recognized by the National Weather Service. So why do we exist? Weather really we see as the manifestation of climate and over the last few decades we've seen increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events all over the world. We saw record years of hurricanes and wildfires and other natural disasters. In 2020, we saw $210 billion in weather-related damages worldwide. In 2021, actually an article just came out in the last day or so, the US saw $145 billion in damages from winter storms and tornadoes, other events. So 2022 is projected to be just as bad, if not worse. And these numbers are growing into the trillions over the next decade. What we're seeing is a consensus really steadily growing not just in government, but across industry that climate change and extreme weather are really one of the greatest challenges that we face. Well, what's actually being done about it? Unfortunately we're seeing many climate mitigation efforts still focus decades in the future when the reality is that extreme weather is happening right now. Shockingly much of the world is blind to good quality weather data as Marshall alluded to. This is not just a problem in the United States, but it's much more significant in other parts of the world. And bad quality weather data leads to bad quality weather forecasts. And the forecast itself also hasn't really evolved in the last century. And it's difficult for the non-weather geeks, as Kathy mentioned, to really understand weather and contextualize it to the day-to-day decisions that we're making. And the result is that weather costs are growing. Businesses and organizations are really reactive to extreme weather. And many of the traditional players in the industry are focused on providing services, meteorology services, rather than really scalable solutions. And our approach is to translate the traditional weather forecast into what we call weather intelligence. So that means our software platform doesn't just tell you the weather, but it understands your unique operational needs and helps you to kind of skip that cognitive step. So when you're interpreting, what does barometric pressure mean to me or relative humidity or wind speed? The platform might tell you, implement extreme heat protocols to protect your workers or slow down or change your route due to icy conditions or switch your AC to circulation mode because the air quality is gonna be bad along your track. And regardless of the industry or the agency you work in, we can provide these custom tailored insights that are unique to your specific use case. So taking a step back, when you think about the value chain of weather, which really starts, as Kathy described from the observations themselves, right? These are buoys in the ocean, ground-based weather stations, aircraft, all the way to satellites in space. All of these systems are feeding data into the numerical weather prediction models that create the forecast that you and I are looking at on our phones and products on our computers on a daily basis. Most of this work was traditionally done by government agencies because it was expensive. We went a century ago, rooms of meteorologists were calculating weather by hand over time that evolved into massive supercomputers and extensive observation networks and private industry mostly repackaged that data. It's a nice-looking user interfaces, as Kathy mentioned, and really made very few contributions to the underlying technology. Ultimately, they really have just relied on human meteorologists to interpret and contextualize the forecast for the end user. And this has led to that bias that Marshall described, right? Higher-income countries, higher-income communities, significant inequality of data access and forecast quality both in the US and around the world. And the fundamental limitation in the industry is actually this access to basic weather observations and data. One of the most important observations is precipitation, it's a rainfall, snowfall. And as you can see on this map on the left, the ground-based radar infrastructure, which allows us to see that precipitation is really heavily concentrated in the developed world. So the US with NEXRAD, Western Europe, Japan, a few other places, but even then that has significant limitations. And in certain dimensions, the only way to solve this observational gap is from space. We can't build ground-based radars over the oceans, for example. And so you might wonder why the gaps in Africa are over the ocean's matter, right? Well, because these forecast models depend on global data. When we have gaps in observations, we make assumptions. And inevitably our models and assumptions are eventually wrong. Our chief weather officer often says, you know, all models are wrong. And in order to validate them and improve them, we need more ground-based observations or more observations. And hurricanes are a great example of this. So the wind and the heat over the Sahara Desert actually impacts the formation of storms over the Atlantic, which eventually obviously hit us right here at home. We've really improved our ability to understand the trajectory of our hurricanes over the last few decades. But what we're not very good at is the intensity. And intensity is what matters when it comes to evacuation planning. Ultimately, that's what determines the amount of damage or in a worst-case scenario, lives lost if we make the wrong decisions. And so where are we today? You know, the new normal is really that the weather and the climate tech industry is in a bit of a paradigm shift, right, where private industry and companies like us are leveraging all of the decades of work from the government and academia and collaborating with the government to drive solutions across the entire value chain. You know, last year we saw the IPCC, excuse me, the IPCC report, which I think was a much worse prognosis than many people expected. And we've had events like COP26 last fall. And these events are really showing us that we need a whole-of-nation approach on timelines that are just much more aggressive than we've had in the past. You know, a decade old report or survey is not going to be fast enough with the dynamics of what we're seeing in our environment. And we've reached a critical inflection point, right? Where it costs technological development and innovation across the private industry can really play this new role. And we're not dependent on the government to exist. And so you might have heard of the term space 2.0. You know, one of the key pieces that we're seeing here is, you know, a two or three order of magnitude reduction in costs, not just for launch capabilities, but the hardware and the tech that we need to improve our remote sensing capabilities. Cloud computing, this allows us to run these large-scale numerical weather prediction systems that are containerized and easily reconfigurable so that we can be more nimble and adaptable to the changes that we need in the systems. We've also got unprecedented access to these new data sets. You know, the rise of internet of things and other smart sensors and, you know, your phones and your cars all are providing us new data. And last but not least, what we're really seeing is government agencies are realizing that allowing these weather models to be open source actually drives further scientific collaboration. You can bring more minds to the table to drive things forward. So let's talk a little bit about satellites. So beginning with the tropical rain monitoring mission in the late 90s, early 2000s, GPM, which is really the current state of the art. NASA and others have made enormous strides to really further the science and our understanding of space-based radar observations. But these are billion dollar school bus size spacecraft in low earth orbit and they take decades to develop. And as a single spacecraft in Leo, their revisit rate around the single point is only about every three days. And so when you're running a weather model, every few hours or less, that data is really not operationally relevant. Now NASA did show that you could miniaturize something like GPM when they flew Raincube, which actually just de-orbited last year. But the problem with Raincube is the swath width or the area of coverage on the ground was quite small. And so you would need thousands of Raincubes to cover the entire globe. So we actually went to NASA and we said, what's the next step? How can we make Raincube something that's scalable? And they said, we don't know what's next. So we said, okay, challenge accepted. And we went out to design our own solution. And that's exactly what we've done. So we've developed a unique radar system that can actually see not only precipitation, but multiple other important geophysical characteristics. And with our constellation of a few dozen spacecraft, we're gonna improve that revisit rate from every three days down to hourly for essentially the entire globe and at a significant fraction of the cost. And so the implications of this are massive, right? Not just improving numerical weather prediction and model accuracy, but the insights we can provide to aviation, shipping, agriculture, farmers, renewable energy production, and not to mention just better awareness and prediction of extreme weather events and their impact. Just quickly to touch on one other aspect of our company. So we also launched a nonprofit which is called tomorrownow.org. And it's focused on bringing better weather data and weather intelligence to these underprivileged communities, particularly the developing world and Africa especially. They're actually partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve weather intelligence for small order farmers across the continent. And just to wrap up, we see this evolution as a collaboration, right? The public and private sectors can work together and we don't want to and frankly can't replace what the government does, right? Our company is very heavily embedded with NOAA, NASA and others, like I mentioned, and there's a couple of steps that we think can be taken to really accelerate this collaboration. One is really evolving beyond these traditional contracting mechanisms, opening the door to private industry, graduating these commercial data pilot programs to programs of record, expanding the scope to new data sets, more support for joint venture programs where we can have expanded public and private partnerships. And lastly, really being less prescriptive. Give industry the problem and then let us innovate the solution and the path forward so that we're not sort of confined to one perspective of what the solution might be. And by accelerating these efforts, we can really break down these barriers to cooperation and we can create solutions that are actionable and available now rather than decades in the future. That's it, thanks, Dan. That was extremely cool. Thank you, oops, my video, try to turn that on. Bang, go. Thomas, that was an excellent presentation, extremely cool stuff that you and your partners and colleagues are doing. I will invite everyone's already turned their videos on. That is excellent, thank you so much. We have an amazing amount of time for Q&A, which is a really fortunate thing given our panel today. I'm gonna introduce my colleague, Amber Todorov. She is gonna kick off our Q&A today. Amber is on our policy team here at ESI. She's a senior associate and was a big part of bringing this briefing to our audience today. So Amber, I'll turn it over to you to start our Q&A. Thanks, Dan, and big thanks to our amazing panelists. Really interesting topic today. So my first question, and I'll direct it towards Cathy first, but we can go down the line. How can government policies better promote industry innovation in weather and climate or what is needed to unleash the next wave of advancements in weather forecasting? Yeah, a really vital question. Thanks for bringing it up. A couple of things come immediately to the top of my mind. And I'm gonna center them on NOAA because of that central role in this that NOAA still plays, not just for its own forecast, but NOAA is really the kingpin of weather forecasting for all the other agencies in the federal family. So I think if the Congress were to allow or authorize NOAA to use a wider array, excuse me, of more flexible contracting vehicles, that would be great. Right now, both the Defense Department and NASA have tools at their disposal to engage with private sector entities and nonprofits and universities. They're more nimble, they're more flexible until NOAA needs to be able to reach in different ways to the private sector. That would be one thing. There's a program for personnel exchange in the government called IPA, not your India Pale Ale, but a personnel, an interim personnel assignment. And again, NOAA right now has very limited allowance for those and they're sort of one way within the agency. I would like to see much more rich and flexible opportunities to bring private sector personnel into NOAA for a while, really inject some of that fresh thinking into the agency itself, as well as more flexibility for NOAA experts to go work with, right alongside in the company with the private sector and get a keener understanding by hands-on contact of what the corporate need really is. And then one other thing comes to mind and then I'll turn it over to Tim, who I'm sure has got some ideas as well. But to me, a sad fact that NOAA gets major technology upgrades, like stepping up from an old version of super commuting to something closer to the state of the art, NOAA gets those advances all too frequently in the wake of a major disaster. Hurricane Sandy was a great example. Suddenly there's interest and congressional support for upgrading computers. The tropical atmospheric rivers that are flooding the Northwest right now, another great example, congressional focus on observation gaps that would improve forecasting there led finally to a breakthrough in the funding and support to move in that direction. So more of a regularized plan that spans several years, that could be mutually agreed by the Congress and the agency would help tremendously. Tim, I'm sure you've got added thoughts on this. Sure do Kathy. And yeah, this really is about the article that you, I and Marshall wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recently about how we could modify the weather act or make just minor adjustments to it to really give more to the federal agencies that are in this space, partnering with the private sector. For example, expanding the commercial weather data program to have more than radio occultation as a source. I mean, there's so many great data sources out there now. And as Thomas mentioned, another thing we recommended was other transactional authority that have increasing that element of the weather act rather than saying should but shall and really specifying how much more the weather service and other agencies can use that. Because that again, as my last slide showed the capabilities in the private sector now and we're ready to step up and give that to the government to advance their climate readiness and weather preparedness. So great, great points, Kathy. I'll put stump all of them. Yeah, and just for clarity for those who don't know the weird and bizarre world of government contracting, the OTA that other transactional authority is right on the beam with the thought I had about improve and expand the flexibility of contracting arrangements. That's one of those little odd bits in the contracting rules. Thank you both. Thomas, do you have anything you want to add? Yeah, look, I think they pretty much hit on everything. The one just point I'll reiterate is, we need operational solutions that are either existing now or being built. And one of the things that I think is consistent improvement across any legislation, not just the weather act but pre-sip or floods and others is ensuring that we're going out there and finding what industry is doing, how industry can contribute because oftentimes, it's not that visible and you need to make sure that people are doing their homework and understand what tools are available and being built right now. You know, Amber, that brings up one other thought in my time at NOAA, a variety of strictures and restrictions placed on federal employees attending conferences. The conferences that the American Meteorological Society hosts has marshaled those very well. They are fabulous mind-melving places where NOAA folks who on an everyday basis are busy hour by hour putting out a weather forecast, for example, they can get out of that rat cage and actually meet Thomas, meet people from other companies that have those ideas and really get in their head what some of those prospects are. That's the short-term two-day long version of the kind of exchanges that I would advocate for. Yeah, and I would add to that as a former AMS president. Candidly for me, the value of an AMS or an AG meeting has never really been about the presentation of the science because I can go and look at that online. It's about those meetings. One of the reasons there's not nearly as much conflict between the private and public sector as there was when I first got into the weather world 25 or so years ago coming out of graduate school. I mean, there was palpable tension. These entities now work together and the AMS was an integrating factor with its Weather, Water and Climate Commission that was stood up to bring the parties together. And so I think there is an increasing role for those organizations as we now take the next step in public-private partnerships. We now talk to each other and engage. Now how can we optimize that relationship? Thank you all so much. My next question is, and this is directed towards Tim, but we'll go down the line as well. Where do you see the biggest impacts of climate change on the military? And how would advancements in weather forecasting help mission readiness? And as the other panelists answered that, you can broaden that out to agencies that you are most familiar with. Thanks, Amber. Well, I did address this in my presentation, the increasing weather extremes of flooding, for example, is really affecting our bases and installations and therefore the readiness and training capability of the military. But as we look to the future, as I also talked about, I think our operational capability to remain competitive against our adversaries is going to be increasingly at risk because of the higher impact weather will have on these new warfighting concepts I talked about. And interestingly, the one area that you're going to see more play in terms of competition is the Arctic. And that is a tough area to forecast for and things are changing very fast up in that region. I'll be speaking at an event with the US Alaska command coming up next month. And we'll be talking exactly about the changing climate and increasing severe weather and impacts to readiness then. Yeah, Amber, I'll jump in on Tim's coattails. You know, the things that come to my mind in this other agency space that I'm drawing now on recent data and information I've gotten in my capacity as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, but just to highlight a couple of them, water availability or scarcity and distribution of water, a absolutely critical need. There's either, as we say, too much, too little in the wrong place or not the right quality. And right now, any agency's ability, really led by NOAA, to forecast those particulars at the time and space scales that are helpful. It's very limited. I had a great conversation once with the woman who ran all of a sudden, California's water resources. And NOAA at that time was pretty proud of a seasonal outlook it produced that showed whether the next season ahead would be to warmer or cooler than usual, wetter or drier than usual. I asked her if that was a useful product or if she had any thoughts for how we could improve it. And you know what she said to me? She said, I might as well look at the horoscope in the Los Angeles Times. That is not useful to me. This is abroad all of the United States. I need to know for this mountain range and for this drainage, how much snow I'll have in March. So I know how much water I'll have in June and then I can deal with how to manage the reservoir. So getting the weather, the water forecasting down to that kind of scale. And that points a finger or puts a highlight on a current gap in forecasting capability and in the underlying science. We can get our regular weather forecast with pretty good scale out to 10 days, 12 days. And we can do climate outlooks that are, as Marshall said and as Thomas said, they're decade or longer. But this sweet spot of seasonal to inter-annual. So can I forecast something like with that kind of specificity, two seasons, three seasons out, six, nine, 12 months out in an actionable way that that water manager could deal with? And can I then do something again with meaningful skill that's maybe two in two to three to five year timeframe? Here's what you're looking at. The value of filling that scientific gap and developing prediction capability in that domain would be huge for the insurance industry, huge for water and resource managers at every level. So water resource forecasting, it's vital to the Department of Interior. It's vital to the Department of Agriculture for obvious reasons. It's vital also to the US Forest Service for understanding how prepared or how volatile is the ground that a fire might get started on. That's just one quick and easy example that would be really huge to concentrate on. Yeah, and I'll build on that. I served on a National Academies Panel several years ago looking at sort of climate and weather threats to the naval operations. And there's a report out there and I'm pretty sure it's been updated. But even at that time, we're talking about climate change as a threat accelerant and amplifier and things like water availability and changes in agricultural productivity and losses of habitable land because of sea level rise. These drive another element that really is relevant to the military in the sense that around the world when you have people having to leave their homes because they don't have water or they can't produce corn or literally they can't live on their island anymore. They move to other nations and that creates instability, immigration issues, instability at least the conflict and that in turn brings in our military to bear. So by the way, there's a current of that in the United States too, I wanna amplify in the sense that Matt Howard is a former PhD student at University of Georgia now at Florida State University and he's also looked at how changes in coastal areas around the United States are gonna drive people to different places in different cities within the US and who are the winners and losers from your constituent base in terms of losses and gains in terms of municipalities as people respond to changes in their coastal communities as well. So this sort of other aspect of destabilization at the global scale and perhaps even within the nation is something that can bear conflict as well. One other point I'd love to make is from a military perspective, obviously to Tim's point it gives us insights into potentially destabilizing factors but I think on a more tactical level we have a different way of thinking about weather and that is if you look at in the 80s, maybe the early 90s we used to talk about owning the night as a strategic capability. We had night vision goggles and other technologies that our adversaries didn't have and that's been degraded over time now you can buy night vision for your kids at Walmart, right? But what we don't think about is owning the weather and from a tactical standpoint being able to understand where bad weather is gonna happen sometimes we wanna operate in bad weather gives us an advantage and knowing where and when that's gonna occur better than your adversary is an advantage in making tactical decisions if I need to avoid a route because it's at risk of flash flooding or whether soil is gonna be too muddy for my vehicles to get through it or where the fog is gonna hit exactly those are all advantages that we can develop and leverage on a much more kind of day-to-day operational standpoint. And Thomas just to add to it your satellites that you're developing or rather radar basically in space one of the key drivers in so many missions is getting overhead surveillance video and whether it be with drones or even satellites and what will interfere with that clouds? I mean, big, big driver of missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and even as we move to the end of Pacific having overhead ISR intelligence surveillance reconnaissance is a must have and clouds getting away. So we got to time that collection really key consideration. Yeah, exactly. And I think if you look back to the map that I showed of all those ground based radar systems they don't exist for the military operates, right? And, you know, the Middle East and Africa and you know, the developing world is where we operate on a day-to-day basis. By the way, I was in the army I didn't know if we mentioned that but that's how I know what I'm talking about. And so by, you know, doing this from space exactly to your point, you know we get better granularity of the data in those areas. Thank you. I'm gonna pass this over to back to Dan for the next questions. Thanks, Amber. And thanks everyone. I have a question and then we're gonna dip into the mail bag because as much as I'm enjoying this panel our audience is enjoying it too and they're sending in lots of really cool questions. I'll share those in a moment but before I do, I'd like to turn back to Marshall's presentation for a moment and give everyone, we'll start with Marshall and then give everyone else an opportunity to share a little bit more with our audience about how what we're talking about today can help mitigate the inequalities that exist in our society for other reasons the climate and environmental injustices. Marshall, I'd love to hear a little bit more from you about that and then we'll go to Thomas and then to Kathy and to Tim and hear what they have to say as well. Sure, thank you. For too long and I've been at this for a while Tim and Kathy and Thomas and others have as well. For too long, the discussion about extreme weather and climate change is centered in a realm that was frankly irrelevant to most Americans. They didn't relate to it. They did not understand trend lines and sensitivity analysis. They liked polar bears but they didn't see how what was happening to them was relevant to their lives. I think people get it now and again, when I spoke to the House Science Committee in 2019, I got that sense from both sides of the aisle. People feel what's happening and that's why you see numbers shifting on people's perspectives on climate change. I never like to say belief because climate change is not a belief system nor is the sun rising tomorrow or a ball falling from a roof, a belief system. Gravity is a thing. Climate change is a thing. And so I think one of the things that we see increasingly as I pointed out in the discussion is that everyone is exposed to a heat wave like we saw in Portland, Oregon last year. Everyone's exposed to Hurricane Ida but there are fundamentally people that just have disproportionate sensitivity to the event and a lack of a resiliency to bounce back from it. I used to be as a scientist in this field very critical when I know the great folks of the National Hurricane Center would issue a hurricane warning for a locale and I would see people not leave. Now, I still am critical with people that choose to leave and can leave but what I have done as I've dug into this more there are fundamentally people in New Orleans and Houston and Miami that wanna leave but just can't. They don't have the resources or the means. And so I think we have to think carefully going forward about enabling ways to deal with the folks that can't leave in the same way that we have slush funds of finance to withstand COVID or whatnot. Do we need travel funds to get people out quickly if there's a hurricane approaching? I wanna say one more thing as it relates to vulnerable communities as well. We fundamentally have to operate from a new playbook at the local, regional and national scale when it relates to hurricanes. The reason I say this is that we are likely entering an era or in an era of rapidly intensifying hurricanes. If you go back and look at the last two hurricane seasons there were so many storms we went to bed to a cat one, cat two, we woke up to a cat four. And the playbook says, well, I need three days, 72 hours to think about a contraflow in the interstates or to call for mandatory evacuations. The reality is we might need a new playbook because rapidly intensifying storms are gonna force us to think about that. And that has implications for many of those vulnerable communities in these cities. So two points. Head Thomas. Good, okay. Two points I wanna make. So one is, like I mentioned, when you think about these decades long climate forecasts it might say this selection of your real estate is at risk of flooding or more storms. For many people to Marshall's point that's not actionable. I might not be able to sell my house. I might not be able to unwind my investments in a certain area. And that time horizon is irrelevant in most cases unless you're a pension fund that has a 50 year investment horizon, right? For most people it's not really tangible and actionable. So really helping people understand the day to day impact is what matters most right now. And which builds into my second point and if you look at the warehouses that were destroyed by the tornadoes for Amazon, right? Or last year we were invited to speak by a house science subcommittee on the environment hearing on extreme heat. Heat is actually a great example. We're really good at forecasting heat because it's pretty simple relative to some other variables and weather. But we still don't get people the right actionable suggestions of what they should do about it, right? If you're stuck in the city, you're disproportionately impacted by those heat sinks. We're not telling people what they can do to protect themselves, to mitigate the health risks and things along those lines. So translating these timescales down to things that people understand and people can relate to on a day to day basis is what we're lacking and it's what we need. Yeah, and I'll just chime in in his footstop what Marshall said. Thomas' slide showed that observing infrastructure is tended to be concentrated where there's high concentrations of people and high concentrations of valuable tangible assets property. And that leaves voids where there are still people but not the tangible assets to kind of draw the attention. And Marshall's point about, you know, weather and water and flooding, part of the risk that's I think looming ahead of us is as the insurance companies recalibrate their models for these new conditions and they are and they will do that and are free to evaluate risk as they see it and make their economic models work. There's a genuine risk that huge swaths of property in particular along our coasts may find themselves uninsurable. And if that happens, a bunch of dominoes start to fall over. If you can't get property underwritten and protected by insurance, the value of that property sinks catastrophically and it's the value of that property and taxes on that value that provide the funding for basic municipal services in most American communities. So I think about that cascade of people of lower income of less durable, effective housing, poorer quality housing. Now also finding the public services they've been able to get some relief or support from also going away. And Tim touched on this point I think that Thomas did too. We should not underestimate and not be nonchalant about the potential for creating real survivalist challenges in populations within the United States that become really major civil unrest issues. Internal civil unrest on the scale we're used to watching in some other country but could happen here if you have thousands of people in a concentrated area suddenly unable to feed themselves, unable to get warm. They cooled again, really feeling the desperation that would come to any of us with that kind of circumstance. It's a very volatile situation and it could happen right here in our community. FEMA has a fund called the Stafford Act which is a pretty large, pretty flexible body of money that it's authorized by the Congress to use after an emergency, a disaster hits. I think something maybe to look at is whether there should be some kind of fund like the Stafford Fund, but aimed at preventative actions aimed at helping get into the ninth ward of New Orleans before the hurricane hits and making sure there are refuges or shelters or ways to prevent that population from being really devastated and destabilized. Yeah, the idea of pre-disaster mitigation. Tim, please, I'd love to hear your comments on this. No, Kathy was absolutely superb in this. And yeah, and of course, FEMA does a lot of preparedness work and they are funded quite well now with the infrastructure bill to execute that. So I'm, we'll be pleased to see that happen. Two points just to add in all our discussions about environmental justice. I was in on the Mississippi Gulf Coast when Katrina hit and my house was washed away. And I know the people who live down there in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. And this is where they grow up. This is a part of who they are and they don't wanna leave. So Marshall was absolutely right. And so we need to increase their resilience through the capabilities that we're talking about today. But there's others too that aren't mentioned as much and from my travels and Kathy knows the same at NOAA. I've been to Puerto Rico quite a bit as well as Alaska. Native Alaskans and Puerto Ricans both equally deserve that same level of attention and support. Thank you for that, Tim. That's a totally wholeheartedly agree. We did a multi-part briefing series in 2019 and 2020 looking at coastal resilience and did a multi-part series on Puerto Rico and specifically looked at Alaska Native communities. It's really interesting. And Kathy, to your point about the pre-disaster mitigation one thing that we uncovered in our briefing series was how difficult sometimes it can be to access those federal resources and making sure the information is accessible and understandable because the local policymaker may not be a scientist, probably isn't a scientist. Probably not. Well, thank you. I'm gonna turn to the questions that we're getting in from the audience and I'm gonna start with this one. I think it's a really interesting one and it's something that maybe broadens the topic a little bit to some of the other things we cover here at ESI and that is and this is a free-for-all. So I will take an unmuted as a cue that you'd like to make a comment. What role does the panel see for better weather forecasting when it comes to distributed energy resources on the grid and other national security or resilience or adaptation technologies that might be sort of under implementation to generally reduce greenhouse gas emissions or adapt to climate change? I'm gonna start in vector to Thomas because Thomas and I worked together a bit to support some energy companies. I hope I'm not putting you on the spot, Thomas but you're pretty well aware of that. You don't have to necessarily mention who but energy operations and grid operations you support in a big way, don't you? Yeah, we do. So thanks, Tim. We support everybody from solar to wind companies and not just in the US but around the world and obviously there's two variables, right? One is the inputs into those systems. How windy is it gonna be? How sunny is it gonna be? But there's also the demand factor, right? We saw with ERCOT in Texas last year they massively underestimated demand and that caused lots and lots of cascading problems. And so, yeah, it's one providing kind of the actionable tools in our platform to help them understand those decisions and scale them across a large area. So you don't have as many single points of failure but then a constellation like what we're building will provide better clarity. So in coastal regions where Next Rad doesn't have coverage, for example we're gonna see better insights into the winds and solar if you're building that as well. And I would just chime in and add that that kind of more granular prediction about winds, for example, could be a huge value to an independent utility like the California utility to understand, better understand when they need to order a brownout or when they need to shut down a transmission segment to avoid a wildfire. So you just try to let your lines ride through the wind and before you know it you've got a multi-million acre fire burning. That's a catastrophe. And the ability of the independent system operators like ERCOT to not just know what's gonna hit them today or tomorrow but to have a little bit of foresight a few days out so that they can set arrangements with other adjacent portions of the grid that you can kind of swap power and move load around if you've got a bit of a runway with your adjacent operators to make those arrangements that would not have helped much in the Texas situation because Texas is kind of an island unto itself but everywhere else in the country there are really pretty robust interconnects between the different utility regions. You just need to know enough in advance that we've got a build, got a hedge here against the weather event or the heat event that's coming a few days out and develop some cooperative mutual support arrangements to do that. Thank you for that and thanks to the person who asked that question. Another question sort of digging into a little bit about how the sort of the public-private partnership works there's a question in our audience about sort of what the two-way street looks like between what private companies use from NOAA and what NOAA might get in return and not necessarily financial get in return but just the question is a little bit more about like what are some of the terms of how those information sharing arrangements work in practice and what are the benefits to the agency? I'll start here because I have some experience when I was at NOAA the last few years we realized that we need to move more of our data storage to the cloud and we had these great capabilities in the private sector among several providers like Amazon, Microsoft, Google who offered those services and the sort of win-win that we negotiated with all three or that, hey, we got the benefit of their cloud services while we were able to help them discover, use and then value add certain data sets because NOAA's mandate is to make sure all their data is all available to the public but they're not so well funded to make it easy easily accessible. And in fact, if anybody knows who's really familiar with this it is hard not to crack sometimes but we were able to make that handoff to the private sector we got their cloud services they got the data a little easier and they were able to provide some value out and provided services. And then there's similar things happening now for satellites, the joint venture program at NOAA's satellite office, NESDIS is one in which commercial satellite providers are either providing payloads or data and they're working together in a way that NOAA can better inform the design of their systems and in the long run, NOAA will have now access to those space-based sensors. So it's a pretty neat win-win that I think is developing now and those are just a few examples. Yeah, I'll echo Tim's cloud initiative which we tried to get started on my watch but it was slow to germinate but I don't think NOAA would ever have gotten the congressional authorization and funding needed to come anywhere near the IT infrastructure that the private sector already had. So to be able to find a way to do that handshake really improves NOAA's own internal operations and as Tim said, opens the possibility that NOAA produces a gazillion amount like 20 terabytes a day of data but it might as well be in shoeboxes somewhere for all that you can discover it and access and understand, could that help me? So just to get it out into the cloud where like I said before, graduate student up to Thomas and anyone else can explore those data with ideas, applications in mind and see what could be harvested to create some new capability. It's a spectacular open innovation platform. Well, a couple of points to add. So I think there's really three main areas that I think offer mutual benefit. One is the infrastructure development. From NOAA's perspective with the joint venture program for example, private industry can come in and at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the speed build a constellation which otherwise would probably take the government let's be honest, decades to build and billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money and we could do it for a couple order magnitude less. The second is data assimilation. So when you think about radar data, we've got GPM it's a single satellite in low earth orbit again, right? That's providing really science data. It doesn't really have anything, doesn't have any relevance from an operational meteorology standpoint. And therefore most MET services not just in the US but globally don't actually have the tools to assimilate a global space-based radar dataset. And so we're building that together. We're doing those, the software engineering and building the tools, what we call forward operators to actually take that data and build it into the weather model. So because it's never existed, we have to do that together. The third is data protections. Quickly wanted to touch on this, we're a private company, right? We have shareholders and a bottom line that we have to maintain. So we can't necessarily give the data away for free and we have to charge government agencies for it but what we can do is on the science, we can give it away or we can work very closely together. And then also in extreme weather cases like hurricanes and tornadoes and other things, obviously, we wanna collaborate and we'll give that away as well. So there's different ways that we can benefit each other and kind of drive that infrastructure and the science forward. Very cool. I think we have time for one last one and this is kind of a fun question and Marshall, I think maybe I'll direct it to you as an educator. This question comes from someone who works with young people and the question is any advice or thoughts you have about inspiring the next generation of meteorologists and scientists and naval officers and army personnel and the next generation who'll take your positions and Kathy and Tim and Thomas, you obviously have distinguished careers as well. I'd be interested in your thoughts but Marshall, let's start with you. What would you say to the next generation who wants to get involved? Yeah, I'd say that the next generation of scientists, we have to inspire students to understand that science is not the enemy. I think that in this pandemic, I think it's been framed this status time. And in fact, vaccines are good things, weather models are good things, climate projections in science are good things. So whereas, perhaps there's this sort of weather geek science geek curiosity about science, the reality is science and technology are going to really be at the forefront of our ability to survive on this planet. And so that in itself is not only inspiration, it's motivation as well. I think, I know Tim and Kathy or two colleagues that I looked up to as mentors and they have great podcasts, try to absorb as much information as you can from people like them in their pocket. I have a podcast, weather geeks, check it out. And then the third thing that I would say, and I tell this to my students all the time, when I was coming through at Florida State University, the meteorology program, the jobs for meteorologists were basically work at the National Weather Service or go talk to a TV station. These days, there are opportunities that the growth in weather, climate, water enterprise in the private sector and non NGOs and so forth. So make sure you broaden your horizons if you're interested in this particular field because there's so many opportunities out there. And plus up your data, science, AI, machine learning, coding background because that's really a growth area as well. And I may have to disappear. So I may not be able to catch everyone's answer here. Well, Dan, I of course resort to just the thing you might expect of an astronaut. And what I remind young people is you're a crew member on this spaceship called Earth. You're not a passenger. You're not a tourist. And as an astronaut either in my spacesuit or in the space shuttle, it mattered a lot to me to know how my life support system work and to be able to manage it and work with it effectively, keep it running. Our ocean, our atmosphere, our weather and climate, those are our life support system. And just to have some command over your own path through life, you're gonna wanna know how that stuff works. And as Marshall just said, if you do build some real skill and knowledge in understanding how these things work at a technical level, you're gonna have a very wide playing field of opportunity. And not just opportunity scientifically, but I think as our whole conversation today has illustrated, you're gonna have a chance to really make a difference. To be a person whose insight and expertise can really help others live wiser and better lives on this little spaceship of ours where we are all crew members. So you'll study up as if you're preparing for astronaut training because that's your role on this planet. Very well said, Cathy. I'll just chime in and point out that science is cool. And so I recommend all early career professionals and students find that area that is the coolest to them, that they really love. And if you follow that path and do what you love, you will succeed in life. One other caution, that yes, Marshall and I and Tim all know. Tim just said, find your passion, build on your strength, absolutely. But the other thing is, we all have to go to the gym and build up some of our weak muscles now and then. So it's gotta be both in. You find that thing you love and you kind of are spooked by the math or spooked by the computer, double down a little bit. You don't have to become the Nobel laureate in math, but you can become five or 10% better than you were and be an even more effective crew member. So build on your strengths, but don't forget to shore up your weaknesses. At least be the person that when you go to dinner, they can figure out the tip, right? At least have that, right? Marshall, that was for you because of your Thai lunch that you're missing today. Thank you so much for an incredible panel. And that was a really fun way to end the conversation. So thank you for indulging that question from our audience and thanks to our audience for joining us and asking lots of amazing questions. I learned so much and tremendous insights about the climate impacts, the need for weather forecasting to evolve. And I love the idea of weather forecasting becoming weather intelligence. And Marshall, everything you said about sort of the Apollo type effort, treating this with the urgency of going to the moon when going to the moon was kind of optional. And this really isn't optional. Just amazing insights from across the panel. Kathy, Tim, Marshall and Thomas, thank you so much for being amazing panelists. We are two minutes over, so I will excuse you and we'll go ahead and wrap up, but thanks again for joining us today. This was incredible. I would also like to thank Representative Lucas and his staff on the House Science Committee. Thank him for sharing his remarks and apologies for the technical interruption, but we managed that and we were still able to share your message with our audience. So thank you for that. Enormous thanks to Amber, a wonderful colleague here at ESI for all the work she put in bringing the panel together. Also like to share a very special thanks to Lloyd Ritter. Lloyd is a founder and managing partner of GreenCapo LLC. He is a longtime friend of ESI and he is a terrific partner. He's been a terrific partner from the very start when we started thinking about this briefing and this topic and he's been a really invaluable resource as our session today came together. So we're always very grateful for the chance to work with Lloyd and today's event was no exception to that. So thanks very much to him. I'd also like to thank everyone else behind the scenes here at ESI, Dan, O, Omri, Emma, Allison, Anna, Savannah. And today is the first briefing of 2022, but that means it's also the first briefing of our two spring interns, Emily and Grace. So thanks to them as well for helping us behind the scenes. We'll go ahead and end. Dan O'Brien, my colleague, will put up a slide with a survey link. If you have two minutes in our audience, if you have two minutes to take our survey, we really appreciate it. We read every response. We do our absolute best to incorporate your suggestions into our future programming. If you have issues or had issues with the technology or the audio quality, the video quality, if you have ideas for future topics, anything like that, format, presentation, anything, please let us know. It really means a lot when you take a moment to share. We will be making some notices coming up very soon for a really busy February and March and April and beyond 2022. It's a really important time here in DC for climate action. And so we'll be doing our best to bring educational resources to policymakers and their staff at this critical time. Wish everyone a very happy rest of your Wednesday. Thanks again for joining us and we will sign off. Thanks so much. Thank you, Dan. Happy meeting you. Thank you.