NWA 46th Annual Meeting Poster Abstracts 1 Wendy Abshire Supporting the Weather, Water, & Climate Community: Education, Mentoring and Leadership Development The NWA and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have rich histories of serving professionals and students in the atmospheric sciences. Many in the meteorology community are committed to and/or active in both groups, including the authors of this abstract. One recent collaboration highlight includes the co- sponsorship of multiple offerings of Research Operations NEXUS (RON) events. Inspired by our former colleague, RON meetings serve the membership of both groups by facilitating discussion of this important topic. Although the NWA and AMS share members, not everyone is familiar with some AMS offerings that align with this year's NWA meeting Service theme. Our presentation will highlight education, mentoring, leadership and professional development, and mental health initiatives.The AMS Education Program benefits from meteorologists and educators who contribute to and participate in earth science professional development courses for teachers. The Certified AMS Teacher program may be relevant to broadcasters in their work with local schools. The AMS Career Program offers the weather community many professional development opportunities (e.g. webinars including one addressing mental health in the atmospheric sciences, short courses, and podcasts.) AMS, like NWA, supports mentoring with opportunities to mentor and be mentored and engages in "Mentoring365".Students and professionals involved in the weather community may apply to and participate in the AMS Summer Policy ColloQuium, the AMS Early Career Leadership Academy and the annual AMS Washington Forum.Both NWA and AMS have weathered COVID by serving the weather community virtually and both groups continue to evolve to better serve members and the public by 1) including a renewed emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion with the hiring of a DEI director at the AMS to support the new Culture and Inclusion Cabinet and, 2) the launch of the AMS WeatherBand for weather enthusiasts. 2 Jared Allen Flood After the Flames: A New Wildfire-SAFER GIS IDSS Approach Over 10 million acres burned in 2020 due to wildfires; the second highest total since 1983, and the third time in the past six years 10 million+ acres burned in a calendar year. From the Rockies west to California, new individual record large wildfires occurred with the Mullen Wildfire (WY), Cameron Peak (CO), East Troublesome (CO), SCU Complex (CA),and LNU Complex (CA), just to name a few. To better understand the millions of acres and vulnerable infrastructure points at risk for debris flows and flash flooding, a new Wildfire-SAFER (Situational Awareness For Emergency Response) ArcGIS Online (AGOL) IDSS (Impact-based Decision Support Service) application was developed and shared with multiple NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs).The Wildfire-SAFER AGOL application is designed to highlight experimental debris flow and flash flooding extrapolated channels, USGS debris flow basin and creek segment probabilities, known building footprints, NWS watches & warnings, estimated MRMS rainfall, rain gage data, surface water routing, and latest wildfire hotspots and firefight details. This application evolved during the 2020 wildfire season and was used for both pre-event internal NWS training, core partner mitigation and planning, and also real-time monitoring for enhanced IDSS messaging. Through the NWS GIS Mutual Aid Team, this application has been developed for 11 NWS WFOs and mapped over 30 wildfires across ~6 million acres for plausible debris flow and flash flooding impact locations. This presentation will highlight the NWS Wildfire-SAFER application concept and how it was used by NWS Cheyenne, WY, NWS Boulder, CO, and NWS Monterrey, CA forecast offices for internal training and first-class external IDSS prior to and during atmospheric river and thunderstorm events. 3 Jared Allen Simulating an EF-5 Tornado Event in a Virtual Exercise World For over a year, COVID-19 has prevented NWS personnel from meeting in-person with core partners for table-top and functional weather exercises. As a result, innovative virtual delivery of weather injects were necessary to maintain both internal NWS practice and external core partner proficiency in awareness, communication, and Incident Command Structure (ICS) hazard management. To be weather-ready and maintain skill sets, the NWS offices of Cheyenne, WY and Riverton, WY developed and delivered over 40 severe weather exercise injects for a multi-county, multi-agency functional EF-5 tornado exercise in the state of WY. In this exercise, NWS Cheyenne and NWS Riverton developed a shared Google Drive Folder for simulated County Warning Area (CWA) Situation Reports, simulated radar imagery, mesoscale graphics, watch and warning text products, simulated Facebook and Twitter severe weather reports, and a preliminary damage path as a simulated tornado impacted both CWAs. In addition, mock phone calls and statewide radio communication calls were made by both offices during the exercise to further deliver simulated weather impact information. Core partner feedback was very positive of the multi-NWS office weather inject delivery method through Google Meet. Furthermore, several injects were scheduled to be emailed at the precise moment of the verbal sharing over Google Meet for core partner inject delivery. Through this exercise, both offices and core partners determined further best practices and lessons learned for the upcoming severe weather season. This digital inject repository and template can be used repeatedly for future exercises, teleworkers, and delivered remotely to best simulate a table-top to functional exercise in a virtual communication environment. 4 Matthew Anderson Analysis of Two Lake-Enhanced Snow Events along the Tennessee River The synoptic and mesoscale environments conducive to lake-effect snow events, and the societal impacts of such events, have been thoroughly documented in the literature. Lake-effect snow is common across the Great Lakes region from late autumn into much of winter. In rare cases, however, it occurs over much smaller bodies of water, even in the southern United States. Due to the low frequency of these events ,only three to five per decade have been documented by the NWS in Huntsville and University of Alabama in Huntsville researchers, lake effect snow provides significant forecast challenges. Although these events do not produce the magnitude of snow observed across the Great Lakes, the events further south can have similar societal impacts.This study will examine two lake-effect snow events that occurred downwind of Lake Wheeler, along the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, in late 2020. Vertical temperature profiles, surface temperatures, water temperatures, and wind direction will be examined to determine if proven thresholds, found in the Great Lakes, can be used to anticipate these events. Occurrence of typical lake-effect processes on Lake Wheeler, including thermally-direct circulations, convection due to low-level instability, and convergence due to differential friction, will also be investigated. Finally, we evaluate high-resolution numerical weather model output from the 2020 snow events for clues on how these models can be utilized to better forecast lake-effect snow on small bodies of water. 5 Stephanie Avey Going Virtual With The Aviation Weather Testbed The Aviation Weather Testbed (AWT) is a research-to-operations facility within the NOAA National Weather Service's (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Aviation Weather Center (AWC). As a standalone NOAA Testbed facility, the AWT was established in 2009. The AWT was established to facilitate the mission and realize the vision of NOAA AWC. The AWT achieves this through a physical and technical environment conducive to an efficient research-to-operations (R2O) process.A vital step in achieving the goals of the AWT is the evaluation of experimental and prototype products and services built to improve and support aviation planning in the National Airspace System (NAS). By collaborating with both internal and external stakeholders and partners, the AWT strives to develop and evaluate products that meet the evolving needs of both the aviation and weather enterprises with the goal of improving their decision making tools and processes. To facilitate this collaborative evaluation process, each year AWC invites stakeholders and partners to participate in their annual experiment in Kansas City. However, 2020 brought forth a global pandemic, which was ongoing into 2021, making in-person experiments impossible. To adapt, the AWT team took their experiments virtual. Instead of one large-scale experiment focusing on multiple themes and capabilities as in years past, the team decided that demonstrating one product at a time would lead to a more targeted participant list and enhanced engagement in the virtual realm. With all discussions taking place electronically, the virtual AWT was able to bring in a wider range of perspectives from users and stakeholders who may not have been able to attend the in- person events. A general overview of the 2020 and 2021 virtual AWT evaluations, lessons learned from making the transition to all virtual, and a look at how AWT activities will proceed beyond 2021 will be presented. 6 Patrick Ayd NWS Duluth Onboarding During Challenging Times In The GS5-12 Progression Era 2020 brought both