National Weather Center plans progressing

The National Weather Center in Norman is a joint venture between the University of Oklahoma (OU) and NOAA. This unique opportunity to strengthen the government-university science partnership will result in a world-class weather center with academia, research and operations under one roof.

The state-of-the-art facility will house five NOAA components and seven OU components. The NOAA components include the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the Storm Prediction Center, the Weather Forecast Office, the Radar Operations Center's Application Branch, and the Warning Decision Training Branch, for a total of 263 staff. The OU components include the School of Meteorology, the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the Environmental Verification and Analysis Center, the Center for Spatial Analysis and the International Center for Natural Hazards and Disaster Research for a total of 224 staff and over 350 graduate and undergraduate students. Consolidating staff and students will help facilitate some of the most advanced and cutting-edge research in the world.

The current status of the project is that we have completed the scoping phase of the project and provided OU with our design requirements. In addition, we have completed the schematic design for the National Weather Center. We are currently awaiting Department of Commerce approval to proceed to full design. Based on the current schedule, the ground breaking may occur later this year with completion of the National Weather Center scheduled for February 2006.