NGA meteorological team provides vital mission support for agency and partners

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has weather forecasters, and the GEOINT Meteorological and Oceanographic Operations - commonly referred to as the METOC team - provides essential support to NGA and its partners.

Like their TV colleagues, NGA's weather forecasters analyze and translate raw weather data and maps into plain language their audience can understand and use, often helping to ensure the safety of life and property. They just do it for a different mission.

"We offer so much more than a 'golf forecast,'" said a weather forecaster on the METOC team. "From our intelligence community-leading efforts in operationalizing [weather] in support of various cabinet-level stakeholders, to our breakthrough initiatives in forensic meteorology, we are leading in our respective fields and innovating truly impactful support to the warfighter, the IC and the U.S. government at large."

The METOC team consists of eight team members - meteorologists, weather scientists and a data scientist - who together support NGA, combatant commands as needed, and other agencies within the Defense Department and IC. Although other entities, such as COCOMs, have METOC teams, none of them handle as broad a range of work as NGA's team - performing operational forecasting, forensic analysis and weather security.

Forecasts aid collection orchestration and more

The team may be small, but its members are aware of the large global impact both the actual weather and their weather forecasting can have.

"When we think about what it means to 'know the world and show the way,' meteorology and oceanography are pivotal aspects of both,'' the weather forecaster said. "Weather has arguably the biggest influence on human behavior, and those impacts span across all countries. We evolved as a species, in large part, because of weather.''

NGA's meteorologists provide weather forecasts used to shape collection orchestration efforts by identifying cloud coverage impacts to global electro-optical collection operations as well as potential weather impacts to various locations. METOC forecasters also highlight areas of emerging crises caused by natural disaster and speak as subject matter experts about weather impacts on various intelligence priorities.

"We harness our subject matter expertise to inform not only collection orchestration, but also analysis of the where, when and why of adversary behavior in order to predict their future actions through a weather lens,'' said a METOC scientist. "The team knows the weather impact and uses that to inform intelligence professionals' analyses about the likely way forward."

Recent focus on hurricanes

The METOC team focuses on global missions as well as stateside missions.
During Hurricane Helene in late September, the team tracked storm intensity and briefed NGA Director VADM Frank Whitworth daily, as well as produced slides to provide warnings of the impending hurricane, storm surge and extreme flooding from the Florida Panhandle to interior areas of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia.

During Hurricane Milton in early October, the METOC team provided updates on impacts to Florida's western coast, including providing advance warnings to NGA employees assigned to the U.S. Southern Command and U.S. Central Command in the Tampa Bay area, as that area was in the path of the storm.

Afterward, the team tracked weather conditions post-hurricane to aid NGA's support to recovery and relief efforts, as well as collection needs required for damage assessments.

Committed to the mission

Most of the members of NGA's METOC team have been studying and forecasting weather and for years.

The METOC team lead has a broad experience and even had a previous career in radio and television as a meteorologist. The team lead was a weather reporter on the radio from 1995 to 2005, and in the early 2000s, worked weekends and holidays as a television meteorologist with a local station in Long Island, New York, until he was recalled to active duty with the U.S. Navy.

METOC teammates cite the pivotal role their team plays not only in NGA's mission, but the entire DoD and IC enterprise mission set as the reason they prefer performing weather forecasting at the agency rather than somewhere else.

Whether helping analysts understand the environment they are studying or providing alerts about potential weather hazards and natural disasters, the team is proud of its mission impact - keeping the world safer, one weather forecast at a time.