The federal agency says it has taken a long, hard look at the way it has always done business and decided it was coming up short — not in forecasting the weather, but in understanding how that weather might affect people and businesses on the ground.

“Before, we’ve been kind of this black box, spitting out information,” said Jeff Barlow, an NWS meteorologist and senior forecaster from the agency’s Hanford office. But no more.

Barlow and Lead Forecaster Christine Riley visited The Californian on Thursday to do something the agency wants to get better at: communicating with those who feel the impact of weather and those who report on it.

“We are seeing more and more major, catastrophic events hitting the United States,” Barlow said. “We as an agency started to realize the weather is becoming more extreme.”

The magnitude of these weather disasters and extreme weather events has exposed societal vulnerabilities.

“The extreme events were well forecast,” Barlow said. “But we didn’t really have a concept of the societal impacts.”

Out of these concerns, the concept of a Weather-Ready Nation was born.

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