About NWS
The National Weather Service (NWS), part of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), operates 24/7/365 across more than 150 locations, serving all U.S. states and territories. Its forecasters, scientists, and mission systems teams transform weather, water, and climate data into alerts and impact-based decision support for the public, emergency managers, broadcasters, and government partners.
“When your phone buzzes in the middle of the night with an alert, that comes from the National Weather Service,” said George Jungbluth, Director of Mission Systems and Technology. “We’re behind the forecasts and the information that every American uses to stay safe.”
“Slack plays a really critical role in us being able to communicate quickly and efficiently with our partners, with the common goal of protecting life and property so that people can take life-saving actions.”
The challenge
NWS needed real-time collaboration built for severe weather response
NWS depends on a wide network of partners to help turn forecasts into action. Local law enforcement, emergency managers, broadcasters, federal agencies, and state and local officials all play a role in getting critical weather information to the people who need it.
“We can’t do it alone,” said Jungbluth. “There are 4,000 of us across the country and we rely on that constellation of partners to get our message out and to help us.”
For years, NWS used a homegrown communication system to connect forecasters with those partners. The tool supported the agency through decades of severe weather operations, but was increasingly difficult to maintain. “In severe weather events, when people needed us most, the system wasn’t stable and our partners couldn’t rely on us anymore,” said Jungbluth.
The operational limitations shaped how teams worked. The legacy environment was primarily text based, with no mobile app, limited support for visual information, and no search capability. Partners in the field could not easily send photos or videos back to a forecast office, and forecasters could not quickly pull up what happened during a previous event without downloading logs and searching them manually.
“If partners aren’t able to get that lifesaving information about what the weather’s doing today, tomorrow, or in a couple minutes, then they’re not going to be able to take those lifesaving preparedness actions,” said Brian Miretzky, Physical Scientist and Meteorologist at NOAA’s NWS.
“Our broadcast meteorologists are great message amplifiers. For us to be able to help them with the goal of one message, multiple voices, Slack has played a critical role.”
How NWS works better with Slack
Slack gives NWS a work OS for incident response, partner coordination, institutional knowledge and AI-enabled operations
NWS partnered with Slack to build NWSChat 2.0, a collaboration environment connecting forecasters, emergency managers, broadcasters and state and federal partners nationwide. In an initial Alabama pilot during a month of severe weather, forecasters and emergency managers gave the system a 94% positive rating. NWS then scaled the platform nationwide, bringing more than 20,000 users into Slack before the next hurricane season.
Today, Slack powers NWSChat 2.0 across the agency. More than 25,000 forecasters, emergency managers, broadcasters, and partners use Slack to coordinate during high-impact weather events, share ground truth, brief decision makers, and capture the operational history behind major decisions.
Mission control for severe weather response
NWS uses Slack channels to organize incident response around geography, weather threats, and forecast office responsibilities. When radar thresholds are crossed, a Mission Control Bot automatically creates incident channels (like #incident-tx-flood), pulling in the right experts and data instantly.
“The information that we get from our partners, especially during a high-impact event, is critical,” said Jennifer Dunn, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the NWS Fort Worth/Dallas Weather Forecast Office. “Ground truth really helps us tell the story, which can encourage people to take more action or to actually take action.”
During high-stakes events, huddles cut critical decision coordination from 15 minutes to 2 minutes, replacing chaotic conference calls with instant multi-party video. “Hearing the tone in someone’s voice in a huddle can be more effective than reading an email or reading it in text,” said Dunn.
In the middle of the night during the 2025 Texas floods, NWSChat 2.0 captured the moment when flash flood warnings and public safety coordination intersected. At 2:28 a.m., National Weather Service Austin/San Antonio Warning Coordination Meteorologist Jason Runyen used Slack to alert officials to flash flood risk. That same operational history later became the public record. The Associated Press cited Slack’s archived chat log as the definitive chronology of how the warning unfolded.
During a long-track tornado outbreak across Illinois and Indiana, close to 90 partners joined a huddle in real time to align on the path of the storm, the warning strategy, and public safety actions needed. “That coordination and feedback from our partners in the huddle was key to ensure everybody understood and stuck to the game plan,” said Jungbluth.
NWS also uses more than 200 workflows to automate operational tasks across the agency, helping teams reduce manual work and keep information moving during active events.
Partner collaboration at national scale
More than 13,000 monthly active users — spanning emergency management, broadcast meteorology, public safety, and state, local, and federal agencies — now collaborate in NWSChat 2.0, most as members of the same Slack workspace, extending the platform beyond internal teams to the partners who act on weather information in the field.
Dunn’s office manages a North and Central Texas channel with over 1,700 people, including emergency managers, public safety officials, broadcasters, and other core partners. During high-impact events, the office assigns one person to focus solely on Slack, answering questions, relaying radar analysis, and passing partner reports back to warnings operations.
In one case, an out-of-state emergency manager used Slack updates to decide when a traveling high school group should move, shelter, and avoid incoming storms. In another, local officials used the same channel to keep students, families, and staff safe before a tornado struck an elementary school.
“With all the information that we were conveying on Slack to our partners at the county, city, and school level, they were able to make critical life safety actions,” said Dunn.
Broadcast meteorologists use Slack as a direct line to NWS information while they’re on air. As forecasters share radar updates, storm reports, and timing details in Slack, broadcasters can amplify the same message to the public through TV, radio, and streaming channels.
Many emergency managers and first responders work from vehicles, incident command posts, or disaster areas, where desktop access is unrealistic. Slack mobile gives them a low-bandwidth way to receive updates, ask questions and send ground-truth reports from the field.
“Our partners are out in the field. They’re not always by a computer. They need that ability to reach us on a mobile device. And with Slack, they can put it on their phone.”
Institutional memory for faster decisions
NWS also uses Slack as a critical knowledge layer. Teams use canvas to save severe weather reminders, winter weather guidance, and frequently asked questions in channels before events. That gives partners a single place to find the information they need as conditions develop.
Search changed how teams learn from past events. “Our previous system was very time-consuming to use, even if you knew what you were looking for,” said Miretzky. “Slack search was a game changer.”
In Slack, forecasters can search across channels, decisions, and event history to understand prior actions, improve future service, and answer questions from officials. That context also supports leadership briefings. During major national weather events, NWS teams use Slack to gather station-keeping updates, operations center status, partner needs, and event information for briefings to national security officials, the Department of Commerce, and the White House.
“Every major weather event tracked at the national level in the United States is informed by data we’re pulling from Slack.”
Slackbot brings AI into operational work
To synthesize information already moving through Slack, reduce manual reporting, and help teams stay focused during high-pressure events, NWS now deploys Slackbot with appropriate safeguards.
At the start of a new shift, Slackbot summarizes active incidents, key decisions, and unresolved questions. This helps forecasters understand what happened before they came on duty without spending valuable time combing through messages.
After a major storm, staff no longer reconstruct timelines by digging through channels and logs. From a single prompt, Slackbot assembles warning decisions, communication history, and key events into an “After Action Reports” — and can turn that summarized data into native charts right in the channel, so leadership and partners see exactly what threat data the team is looking at, without ever leaving the conversation.
“With Slackbot, you can ask a question and it’ll search for you,” said Miretzky. “It’s the next step in helping us improve future responses and quickly recap past events.” Slackbot also reduces the time teams spend searching across connected systems. “The ability for Slackbot to integrate with our platforms saves us a lot of time,” said Dunn.
With thousands of forecasters and partners collaborating in Slack, AI can help synthesize actionable information for operations, leadership and public safety. “Slackbot helps us tap into the wisdom of crowds by surfacing the collective knowledge across our network,” said Jungbluth.
Instead of replacing expertise, AI helps teams surface it faster, turning thousands of conversations into operational intelligence that improves both real-time decision making and future response.
“Slackbot will help distill a lot of information into one or two key messages that forecasters can use to better help our public safety partners make decisions.”
What’s next
Expanding Slack to power a mobile, cloud-based, AI-enabled weather service
NWS sees Slack as a foundation for a more mobile, cloud-based operating model, giving forecasters access to the data, partners, and expertise they need wherever conditions require them to be.
“We’re moving to a technology-forward, cloud-based future where, instead of forecasters reporting from physical offices all over the country, they can go where they need to be,” said Jungbluth. “Have forecast, will travel.”
NWS is already bringing software development, ticketing, application work, and operations management into Slack. Jungbluth’s team is using Slack to help vendors and internal teams solve architecture and development questions earlier, reducing duplicated work and giving distributed teams a shared place to coordinate.
AI is a major part of the next phase. NWS is exploring Slackbot for kudos and recognition, shift log automation, translation for international hurricane and volcanic ash coordination, and richer synthesis across connected systems. Translation could help international partners receive storm track changes, volcanic ash advisories and hurricane information more quickly in the languages they use to make decisions.
The long-term ambition is a more flexible National Weather Service: 4,000 people able to bring the full capability of the agency to an emergency operations center, a disaster area, a broadcast partner, or a local community. Slack gives NWS a collaboration platform for that future, and Slackbot gives the agency a way to turn live operational knowledge into faster, more focused action.
