Restructuring the National Weather Service

• Author: Louis W. Uccellini
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12633
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016

842

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 76, Iss. 6, pp. 842–843.

Published 2016. This article is a U.S.

Government work and is in the public domain

in the USA.

Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf

of American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12633.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and

distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modif‌i cations or adaptations are made.

Louis W. Uccellini is director of the

National Weather Service and assistant

administrator for Weather Services for

the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration.

E-mail : louis.uccellini@noaa.gov

Perspective

T he weather is changing. So is weather

forecasting. We now produce more accurate

forecasts with greater lead times than ever

before, especially for extreme events. But, as we have

seen, the value of these improved forecasts can only be

realized through the ability to connect these forecasts

and related warnings to decision makers throughout

government as well as the general public.

To that end, the National Weather Service (NWS)

codified in its 2011 strategic plan the goal to provide

“Impact Based Decision Support Services” to our core

partners in all levels of government in order to build

a “Weather-Ready Nation.” The National Academy

of Sciences (NAS) and the National Academy

of Public Administration (NAPA) in 2012 and

2013, respectively, supported the NWS vision, but

recommended that achieving it would require changes

in NWS ’ s organizational structure and business

processes.

For years, the NWS had been using 17 disconnected

budget categories that were difficult to defend and

manage. The Headquarters (HQ) organization was

unchanged since before the last restructuring in the

1990s, and was not aligned with the budget structure.

Planning, budgeting, and corporate decision making

were disorganized and not bound by robust business

principles. When I became director of the NWS

in 2013, our leadership team recognized the need

to restructure and simplify the NWS congressional

budget; reorganize HQ to align management

authority with budget authority; and define roles and

responsibilities for budget, planning, and decision-

making processes. These steps were essential to

support the leadership team both in HQ and in field

operations.

In 2015, the NWS budget structure was changed

to follow the forecast process—a portfolio structure

that is transparent and makes sense: Observations;

Central Processing (computer infrastructure); Analyze,

Forecast, and Support (forecast operations); and

Dissemination (distribution). A fifth budget portfolio,

Science and Technology Integration (which includes

numerical weather prediction through research and

development), is aimed at improving the entire

forecast process. A sixth portfolio, Facilities, supports

the buildings and sites that house the NWS.

At the same time, we reorganized HQ to map six

offices directly to each budget portfolio. In the past,

our Chief Financial Officer made budgetary trade-offs,

when others in the organization were more suited

to make those programmatic decisions. Now, the six

new HQ Portfolio Offices plan our budgets based on

programs and projects completely aligned with the

forecast process.

We also had to make sure that offices with different

kinds of expertise could work together to offer useful

products and services for our field operations. Thus,

we created the “Office of Planning and Programming

for Service Delivery” to oversee the Portfolio Offices

and assist portfolios with systems engineering

support, threading across multiple budget timeframes

and Portfolio Offices to shepherd projects from

formulation to execution. The Office of the Chief

Operating Officer (OCOO) was created to oversee

our field forecasting operations on a real-time day-

to-day basis. The OCOO ensures we are delivering

more accurate and consistent products and services

and also identifies and prioritizes the requirements

that drive the support from our Portfolio Offices. We

gave a much higher priority to training, treating it as a

corporate function in the Office of the Chief Learning

Officer. We also developed an Office of Organizational

Excellence to look over the horizon, with enterprise-

wide connections including our partners in the private

sector. Lastly, the National Water Center was created

to develop and deliver state-of-the-art hydrology

prediction and related decision-support services.

In parallel with the budget restructure and reorgani-

zation, we sought advice from every corner of the

NWS to develop a Governance Document—which

Louis W. Uccellini

National Weather Service

Restructuring the National Weather Service