>> Hi. My name is Katie [inaudible].
I work for the National Weather Service.
I'm the Executive Officer of Communications,
which means I help manage internal communications from leadership to our employees,
external communications with stakeholders and also a bit of social media.
The National Weather Service has 122 forecast offices
across the country, at least one in each state.
And each one has a central operations area with four or five workstations
where operational forecasters work 24/7/365 writing forecasts, watches, and warnings.
Every day is completely different in my office depending on the current weather event
across the country, whether there is a big snow storm in the Northeast or a hurricane
in the Gulf Coast or a tsunami in the Pacific.
All those things drive my day.
On a typical sunny day across the country, I will be working on speeches for leadership
or trying to move our websites forward up, you know, upgrade and improve upon them.
Yeah, just a whole host of things.
Every morning I start my day with a morning weather briefing, which is about 20 minutes
where we go over all of the weather that happened yesterday or over the weekend.
And then we go over the next week of weather, what we're expecting.
So very much our-- I rely on our forecast to plan out my week as well.
But overall, what we really try to move forward here
at the Weather Service is our strategic goal, which is achieving a weather ready nation.
That's kind of an abstract goal but what it really means is making sure that the nation
as a whole, no matter if it's you and your grandma at home or, you know,
a hospital full of 24/7 workers are prepared for an oncoming weather event.