Delaware Bay Region Severe Weather Planning Website

Challenge: More frequent occurrences of potentially destructive tropical and extra-tropical severe weather events required shared weather data and predictable decision support processes for USCG and navigation stakeholders. Severe weather planning was complicated by the scope of an expansive operational area (over 120 nautical miles) and the wide range of weather conditions possible over the very different geographic areas, from open sea to confined inland channels.

Solution: Forged innovative partnership with the U.S. Coast Guard, National Weather Service, and Pilots’ Association to create the Delaware Bay Region Mariner Decision Support Website ( https://www.weather.gov/phi/dss_port ), a weather aggregating IT solution tailored to critical port locations that enhances daily ship passage planning, risk mitigation, and port-wide severe weather consultation. This tool provides location-specific data for critical areas along the estuary, allowing decision makers in disparate locations to make weather-related decisions based on the same data. Further, development of the site and underlying criteria helped inform the creation of USCG SECDELBAY’s severe weather thresholds, making Coast Guard severe weather responses more predictable for navigation stakeholders. Appropriate severe weather planning utilizing these tools has helped improve port resilience and facilitated the return to normal conditions following severe weather events.