Weather, Water and Climate Impacts on National Security: Complementary Perspectives from Leadership Roles in the US Air Force and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) (Invited Paper 731384)

Abstract:

As Chief Scientist for Weather at the US Air force (USAF), the author will provide an overview of how observations and predictions of weather, water and climate impact current and planned/future USAF and Dept of Defense (DoD) worldwide operations, planning for existing and potential new worldwide DoD installations, and related support to the national Intelligence Community. This will include a summary of the partnerships between the USAF and DoD with U.S. interagency, international, and academic organizations for R&D of scientific and technical capabilities. The author will then provide a complementary point of view from his role as President-elect of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) on how the security impacts of weather, water, and climate directly on people (i.e., human security) and on overall societies (i.e., national security) will serve as the basis of the theme of "Environmental Security" for the 2022 AMS annual meeting, to be held in Houston in January 2022. With a rapidly increasing global population coupled with the evolving human and national security impacts from disruption of weather and climate norms, we are seeing a growing influence of weather, water and climate on the security of nations and their peoples. We are organizing the 2022 AMS annual meeting theme around five environmental security pillars, which often have several linkages and dependencies on one another: extreme weather, health, food, water, and energy. As such, the Environmental Security theme is intended to inform the broad AMS membership on the connections of our scientific field to larger societal impacts, and to demonstrate the relevance and importance of our scientific contributions to the basic security needs of the citizens of the U.S. and the world, particularly its most vulnerable groups who often bear a disproportionate share of the impacts.