FIGURE 10.1 Hurricane season in the United States, 2005. SOURCE: Courtesy of the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.

needed to enhance decision making in many economic sectors while meeting the growing need for warnings to enable responses to extreme events.

Improvements in weather prediction require increased accuracy, reliability, and duration of forecasts with finer spatial and temporal detail for a wider array of weather variables. The ability to deliver new suites of user-tailored forecasts will require higher-quality satellite observations, their effective assimilation into NWP models, and better communication between data producers and user communities. The value of space-based observations will be greatly enhanced if useful new data applications are quickly made available to the government, the public, and the private sector—an improvement that will require an enterprise-wide effort to dramatically shorten the current 20-year delay between the availability of research results and their transition into applications. Rapid infusion of technology into operations and decision support will require improved communication and partnerships among the weather-observation agencies, the university modeling community, and users (NRC, 2000, 2003a,b).