As I look at the future of our field, I believe the American Meteorological Society faces a defining moment as artificial intelligence transforms weather and climate science. To successfully navigate this transition, we must confront several pressing hurdles across our enterprise:

• The Demand for Decision Support: We are seeing a growing need for actionable decision support tools rather than raw data alone, challenging us to translate complex forecasts into practical guidance for communities and leaders.
• Federal Fragmentation: Progress is slowed by a lack of effective coordination across the Federal Weather enterprise, which makes a unified national strategy difficult to achieve.
• Observation Gaps: We face a decreasing volume of real-time observations at the scale and resolution needed to truly improve our models.
• Parameterization Shortcuts: There is a heavy reliance on parameterizations instead of actually calculating the physical parameters, which risks masking underlying physics.
• AI Training Biases: Our machine learning training datasets frequently take on the inherent biases of the numerical models behind them.
• Capturing Extreme Events: We urgently need better, higher-resolution modeling to accurately capture extreme events lurking in the tails of forecast distributions.
• The Human-AI Balance: We must carefully define the evolving partnership between machine-driven speed and human meteorological expertise, ensuring that forecasters remain actively engaged to interpret high-stakes guidance and maintain critical oversight in decision support.

By uniting our community around better data, improved federal collaboration, and rigorous science including effective use of AI, we can ensure our efforts truly protect the public. I look forward to working with AMS to provide meetings and forums for the community to build a strong path forward.

David McCarren is a multidisciplinary scientist, policy leader with over thirty years of experience in complex organizations specializing in oceanography and meteorology. His expertise spans the government, public, and business sectors, with a focus on the effects, impacts, risks and decision support associated with these environmental sciences.

Throughout his career, McCarren has demonstrated strong leadership in strategy development, managing personnel, technology, finances and development of guidance and forecast products. His professional background includes serving as the Chief Scientist for the Oceanographer of the Navy, where he coordinated S&T and R&D across the Navy METOC enterprise, supporting all aspects of Navy Information Warfare. He also served in leadership roles as the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research, and as Modeling Lead for the Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command.

McCarren’s experience extends to managing complex research programs, as evidenced by his time as Assistant Director at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute and Executive Director of the Delaware Sea Grant College Program. Throughout his tenure at the Federal Coordinator's Office and his work with the National Earth System Prediction Capability (National ESPC), he played a central role in strategic policy development and inter-agency coordination to unify operational and research efforts. He possesses deep scientific knowledge in areas such as atmospheric and ocean sciences, numerical modeling, remote sensing, and geospatial systems. McCarren holds an MS in Physical Oceanography and Meteorology from the Naval Postgraduate School and a BS in Geological Science from the Pennsylvania State University.

He continues to remain active, supporting Axiom Consulting (a WOSB) in efforts across government. In his free time he handles the manure management issues for their horses at Prevailing Winds Farm.