How the National Weather Service Is Rebuilding the Way America Gets Its Weather
Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The TMF’s $12 million investment enabled the National Weather Service to rebuild Weather.gov, creating the foundation for a new way of building, managing, and delivering technology across the Department of Commerce’s National Weather Service.
Background
Most people open Weather.gov the same way they reach for a light switch. They expect it to just work. Behind that expectation is the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose National Weather Service (NWS) is responsible for delivering accurate, timely weather information to every corner of the country. For years, the technology behind that service was built with long planning cycles, rigid processes, and limited room to adjust when user needs changed. Weather.gov 2.0 started as a plan to update a website, but it became something much bigger.
Challenge
Rebuilding Weather.gov meant confronting two challenges at once. Technically, the project needed to establish a modern technical foundation, specifically automated tools for testing and releasing software updates, to enable rapid software releases. Culturally, the project required transitioning from a slow, step-by-step development process toward a more flexible and iterative way of working. This shift meant evolving how decisions get made to keep teams focused on user needs rather than administrative milestones, all while keeping a high-traffic public website fully operational.
Solution
NWS used the Weather.gov 2.0 rebuild as a live testing ground for modern software development practices. The team built automated tools for testing and releasing software updates quickly and reliably. Also, NWS leadership gave team leads the authority to make daily decisions without waiting for approval from multiple layers of management, keeping the team focused on delivering value to users rather than working around slow internal processes. As the approach proved successful, the agency moved to make it standard. NWS launched a formal training program to spread flexible, user-focused ways of working across the organization and the requirements every new technology project must meet from day one so that every new project starts with the same foundational infrastructure.
Impact
By establishing a new standard, the Weather.gov 2.0 rebuild shaped the contracting strategy for four additional major cloud migrations, with more to come. All of them are required to use the same flexible, user-focused development approach. The project also significantly improved the speed of the NWS data service the website depends on to deliver forecasts. After tracking system performance and addressing the biggest sources of delay, NWS made its weather data three times faster since the start of the year, cutting wait times by 66%. That speed improvement benefits everyone who builds tools and applications using NWS weather data, from app developers to emergency managers. Ultimately, Weather.gov 2.0 continues to successfully spread user-focused ways of building technology across NWS, leading to lasting improvements that benefit internal operations and the American public.
Role of TMF
TMF funding made it possible for NWS to take on a technical and cultural transformation that would not fit neatly into a standard agency budget cycle. Rebuilding a high-traffic public website while simultaneously building new ways of developing software, training staff, and building reusable infrastructure requires sustained investment across multiple efforts at the same time. TMF provided the flexibility to pursue all of it together, giving NWS the ability to prove the new approach worked, improve it, and spread it across the agency. The investment is expected to generate long-term savings as the standardized development practices reduce duplication and eliminate the need to rebuild the same technical foundation from scratch for every new project.
