CHAPEL HILL, NC–Leaders from the National Weather Service, meteorological researchers from RENCI and  North Carolina campuses, and community decision makers will convene Oct. 29 and 30 to discuss decision support, technology trends, and how technological tools can improve forecasts, severe weather warnings and communication with the public on weather issues.

The Summit on Decision Support Services and Technology seeks to define a demonstration project that will show how technological innovations can be used to make informed decisions, such as what actions to take during severe weather warnings. The planned demonstration project would also examine how technology can improve public communication and understanding about weather and related events, such as floods, and how to make better use of existing weather data.

“Community decision makers needs to be able to find, analyze, and act upon weather data, sometimes very quickly and in dangerous situations,” said Ken Galluppi, head of RENCI’s disaster and environmental research projects. “New technologies that use high performance computing, visualization and data aggregation and management techniques to understand data from sensors, satellites and radars can affect how decisions are made and how messages are conveyed to the public. In the simplest terms, good decision support tools can save lives and resources.”

Future technologies likely to be discussed at the summit include networked collaboration and situational awareness tools, high-end computing from the desktop to a computing “cloud,” visual analytics, digital data management, human-computer interactions, the use of social networking tools and sensor technologies.