The Director of the National Weather Service is in Albany today to deliver a talk called "Building a Weather-Ready Nation."
UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Science and Atmospheric Science Research Center is bringing Dr. Louis Uccellini to the uptown campus to talk with the college community and area state agency leaders. "One of the major strategic goals of the National Weather Service in building a weather-ready nation is to connect our forecasts and warnings more effectively with the national, state and local emergency management community so that we are providing the information that they need in a way that they can use to make decisions that certainly affect people's lives."
Dr. Uccellini is scheduled to discuss how preparation assists decision makers, including emergency management, water resource communities, health officials and others. In both summer and winter in recent years, Gov. Cuomo has made storm preparedness a hallmark of his administration.
Everette Joseph directs UAlbany’s Atmospheric Sciences Research Center: "The visit is important to the university because it solidifies, it strengthens our partnership with the National Weather Service and our leadership in the development of the New York State Mesonet, which is 125 stations we're deploying around the state to improve the resiliency of the state to extreme events. Additionally it's a good visit for our students who are working on research in this area and will have an opportunity to meet and talk to the director of the National Weather Service."
Uccellini adds: "We're in Albany to talk with the state officials who work the emergency management to ensure that we're providing the information they need. And we're also here to work with the university community because there's a lot of work that needs to be done in terms of not only improving our forecasts and warnings, but also to make sure that we're linking to decision making in a way that is most-effective."
David Rousseau is interim dean of the nation's first College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, at UAlbany. "One of the primary areas that we're interested in is the relationship between severe weather and emergency management. As we all know, the climate has been changing. We see more severe weather in terms of storms, in terms of fires, in terms of other aspects, the snowstorm in Buffalo, for example. And what the new college is going to do is focus in on how we respond to that, how we recover and how do we mitigate in order to reduce the hazards posed by these new storms to citizens of New York state as well as around the country."
The talk begins at 1 p.m. on the uptown campus.
