jeffrey k. lazo
Jeff at the Kremlin in Moscow. He traveled to Russia with Rodney Weiher, chief economist of NOAA, to coordinate on their development of socioeconomic assessments of their weather services (12-17-30 September 2007). During FY2007, Dr. Lazo continued managing the Societal Impacts Program (SIP), which focuses on research, community support, and outreach and education to enhance the use of social sciences in the weather enterprise.
Conferences, Workshops, and Community Support
Jeff worked with Eve Grunfest and Julie Demuth to facilitate the Weather and Society * Integrated Studies (WAS*IS) workshops: one in Melbourne , Australia and one in Boulder, Colorado. WAS*IS aims to better integrate weather and social science to empower practitioners, researchers, and stakeholders, in all sectors of the weather enterprise, to forge new relationships and to use new tools for more effective socio-economic applications and evaluations of weather products.
The SIP continues to develop a range of information resources including the website (www.sip.ucar.edu), a Societal Aspects web page, the Extreme Weather Sourcebook, the weather and society (WxSoc) internet based newsgroup, a Societal Impacts newsletter, and the Digital Library of Societal Impacts (DLSI). Efforts in FY07 focused on updating the Extreme Weather Source book to current year estimates.
Jeff is the chair of the World Meteorological Organization's World Weather Research Program Societal and Economic Research and Applications working group, a member of the WMO Task Force on Socio-Economic Applications of Meteorological and Hydrological Services, and a member of the NOAA Science Advisory Board Social Sciences Working Group.
Research Activities
Dr. Lazo, working with Pete Larsen of the University of Alaska, Don Waldman of the University of Colorado, and Megan Lawson of Stratus Consulting in Boulder, Colorado, continued research on the sensitivity of the US economic sectors to weather variability. Working with Rebecca Morss and Julie Demuth of NCAR, Jeff worked on the development and implementation of a survey of US households sources, uses, perceptions, and values for weather forecasts. This work also examines individuals' understanding of and preference for uncertainty information in weather forecasts. Working with Emily Laidlaw and Julie Demuth (NCAR), he is currently developing a Delphi method assessment of the value of weather forecasts in the transportation sector.
Funding Sources
The research and these activities are supported by the National Science Foundation through its support of RAL and the SERE Lab, as well as funding from the US Weather Research Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.