​NOAA spends billions of dollars each year monitoring and predicting weather, water, and climate threats to help protect lives and property and enhance the nation’s economy. However, NOAA’s “environmental intelligence” can only achieve its full potential value if risk is communicated effectively, empowering individuals, communities, and businesses to pursue the response options that are best for them.

The integration of social, behavioral, and economic sciences (collectively referred to as “social science”) into National Weather Service (NWS) products, services, and data can improve decision-making by making information easier to understand and more relevant to the users’ decision-making needs. As an additional benefit, social science assists the NWS with:

• Understanding and quantifying the societal and economic benefits NWS brings to the nation,
• Communicating the return on investment to the general public,
• Measuring outcomes and improving performance within the organization,
• Setting targets for future accomplishments, and
• Prioritizing investments to better meet its mission.

Challenges still exist toward achieving successful social science integration into forecast operations, including overcoming perceptions that weather information should be purely meteorological, or put another way, that societal impacts can only be reduced by improved forecast accuracy. Integrating social science into NWS forecast operations means it must be woven throughout NWS operations (as a regular business practice) and not be put off to the side as something extra NWS can choose to utilize or not.

NWS' evolution toward Impact-Based Decision Support (IDSS) requires NWS to understand the bigger picture of the societal impacts of environmental phenomena.  Moreover, NWS must use knowledge gained from social science research to better understand the relationship between environmental information and decision-making within the broader society.  Recent social science successes point to significantly better user response that results in lives saved and impacts minimized.