An Assessment of the Fiscal Requirements to Operate the Modernized National Weather Service 3.- WFO Maintenance This account provides funds associated with routine and preventative maintenance for over 200 NWS buildings. It encompasses contractual janitorial, landscaping, HVAC and UPS maintenance services plus, cyclical facility maintenance and equipment replacement. Recommended funding in FY 1998 provides sufficient resources to maintain annual operations and services contracts, restore equipment maintenance efforts plus conduct a reasonable preventative and corrective maintenance program. This funding is comparable to industry norms. FY 1999 funding maintains these activities and provides a small amount for cyclical replacement programs. While the major focus of NWS modernization activities center on AWIPS, several existing programs require replacement/modification. Additional funding is needed for continued receipt of critical observational data to support forecast and warning responsibilities and the existing Distance Learning system must be improved. These FY 1999 initiatives are highlighted in Table 16 - New Initiatives. These funds are additive to those identified in earlier sections. The added funds above the FY 1999 OMB Submit for the radiosonde replacement program will enable NWS to procure an additional 24 radiosonde computer workstations (total of 74), thus accelerating the modernization of the existing national upper air observing network. The Cooperative Observer Network is a volunteer effort of observers who provide NWS with an order of magnitude increase in the number of surface observations available for 1 An Assessment of the Fiscal Requirements to Operate the Modernized National Weather Service the CONUS. Cooperative observations have also traditionally provided valuable supplemental data to forecast offices. Their value to the climate community has increased as ASOS equipment replaced human observers at many locations, because important elements of the climate record cannot be measured by automated methods. Over time, the quality of the equipment used by these observers has degraded, the number of participants in the network has decreased and the geographic representation of the network has eroded. This initiative will begin to address these deficiencies. The Distance Learning Upgrade adds NWS-wide two-way motion capability to the existing regional wide area network. G.—Summary As Table 17 depicts we believe both the FY 1998 President's Budget and FY 1999 OMB Submit contain inadequate base funding. The majority of the shortfall is caused by insufficient funds to account for labor and non-labor inflationary costs and to support required field (i.e., Weather Forecast Offices) staffing levels. The labor shortfall is particularly acute in FY 1999. Another factor is both budgets assume savings associated with the relaxation of station closure requirements mandated in Public Law 102-356 (NWS Modernization Act). Repeal of this Act is unlikely. While increases are required in the BASE account, we believe some offsetting reductions are possible particularly in FY 1999 in the modernization accounts. Our revisions preserve NWS priorities; however, we did shift funds to rectify systematic deficiencies in core mission areas (e.g., Cooperative Observing Program, Voluntary Observing Ship program). Funding levels provide necessary resources to sustain NWS' infrastructure. An Assessment of the Fiscal Requirements to Operate the Modernized National Weather Service SECTION VIII. - CROSS-CUT ANALYSIS The activities and programs discussed in this section encompass all NWS organizational levels and contain both labor and non-labor costs. The costs of these activities have been included in Sections VI and VII. A. — Research/Development and Technology Development/Refreshment For NWS to fulfill its policy, operational, and support role it must not only maintain state of the art awareness (i.e., be a smart-buyer and smart-user of technology), but play a national leadership role in promoting knowledge and technology in the areas for which it has core responsibility. NWS need not be the biggest contributor, but it must be able to ensure that R&D addresses the issues most critical to meeting its mission requirements. It can only do this by being a key contributor to the process. NWS has this responsibility in important aspects of observation, phenomenology, forecasting and dissemination in meteorology, hydrology, and climatology. NWS requires a broad range of research and developmental activities to maintain and improve the products and services provided to the nation and uses NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR) as its primary research arm. Within OAR, the Environmental Research Laboratories (ERL) accomplish the majority of the NWS-related work. While NWS does not either directly fund the bulk of OAR's programs or control internal OAR prioritization of research efforts or decisions on the levels of work to be accomplished, it does collaborate with OAR in defining research objectives and in the transition of new science and techniques into routine operations. In FY 1997, OAR expended approximately $23.2M on NWS related work. Efforts to improve short-term warnings and forecasts equaled $19.8M ($12.3M of OAR funds and $7.5M of NWS funds) with an additional $3.4M of funding directed at climate related research. From a funding perspective, NWS supports in a limited way the U.S. Weather Research Program. NWS also draws on research performed by the academic community, private sector and national laboratories. The ties with the academic components of the atmospheric science community have traditionally been strong and fruitful. NWS through the Collaborative Science and Technology and Applied Research (CSTAR) program states science needs to the University community and provides funds (Cooperative Institute, Partners program and graduate fellowships) for R/D activities. While the laboratories and academic community focus on the research end of the R/D spectrum, NWS, as one would expect from a science based service organization, devotes considerable resources to the development end. At all levels, from WFOS and RFCs to Headquarters, NWS staffs are actively engaged in technical development, infusion and product improvement activities. The Offices of Meteorology and Hydrology formulate policy for, and facilitate orchestration, of hydrometeorology development activities. Table 18 - NWS FY 1997 Technical Development/Infusion - outlines our estimate of the FY 1997 An Assessment of the Fiscal Requirements to Operate the Modernized National Weather Service Section VIII - CROSS-CUT ANALYSIS staff and contractor efforts engaged in technical development/infusion work. Funding for these activities is provided from BASE and modernization accounts (primarily AWIPS and NEXRAD). NCEP also obtains funding, so-called "soft money" (approximately $5.5M in FY 1997) from many external sources to support numerical model development efforts. Overall, in FY 1997, approximately 332 NWS employees and 116 contractor personnel were engaged either full or part time with technical development activities. This level of activity will continue in both FY 1998 and FY 1999. The majority of efforts by the Headquarters, NWS staff were directed at applications software development for AWIPS. Our analysis revealed that meaningful and productive work was being accomplished (in the case of the Environmental Modeling Center -EMC- and the Climate Prediction Center CPC- much of it is "world class") by these individuals and their respective offices and collectively the NWS and the nation will benefit. However, we could not find an overall NWS plan that ties all these activities together, prioritizes them in terms of importance and specifies required completion dates. Additionally, we could not locate a formal NWS policy directive outlining how R/D and technical development requirements are stated, related to end-users needs, validated and prioritized nor could we see evidence of a corporate process to manage, allocate resources, assign priorities and coordinate the overall NWS technical development program. Lack of such a process also limits NWS' ability to coordinate and leverage the work being accomplished by external agencies. We did note that several individual offices and organizations do have plans (several are very good) reflecting their views on needs and initiatives to pursue, but in the aggregate, they did not hang together as a coherent whole, traceable to a NWS-wide vision or plan or to budgets. Additionally, absence of an overarching NWS-wide plan introduces the possibility of unnecessary duplication of efforts, reduced teamwork, sub-optimal use of valuable technical resources and allows pursuit of an activity that may not support NWS goals. An area of concern is the amount of "soft money” required to support the EMC. Over time, EMC has been allowed to grow to the point that now over 50% of its funding is from external sources. To put this in perspective, the fraction of "soft money" underwriting EMC is higher than that at many university-based atmospheric science departments. This reliance on outside sources for operating capital raises two potential problems. First, the administrative burden of dealing with multiple grants and contracts is large and impacts time available to conduct the development work. Second, the potential exists to focus on the fund providers development priority vice NWS needs. Within Headquarters NWS, funding for a large portion of the Hydrology and System Development staffs are linked to AWIPS and NEXRAD. The activities these staffs accomplish extend beyond the bounds of these two modernization programs and should be funded from BASE accounts. |