Situation
NESDIS operates the nation's most sophisticated weather satellites — including the GOES-R series and the Joint Polar Satellite System — uniquely capable of detecting and characterizing wildfires from ignition through smoke dispersal. Congress and the White House had taken notice: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act committed an extra $100 million to NOAA for fire capabilities, and the FY22 Disaster Relief Supplemental Act added another $20 million. The 2021 fire season had been one of the most destructive in US history. As NESDIS Fire Program Manager Mike Pavolonis put it: there is no higher priority for NESDIS than fire. The White House and Congress are telling us to just do it.
Complication
NESDIS wasn't ready to just do it. The workshop took place in late March 2022 — weeks before the 2022 fire season was set to begin. Fire detection products from GOES-R and JPSS had been developed through entirely separate acquisition programs, using different algorithms developed by different science leads, with requirements written a decade before satellite launch and no mechanism to update them based on user feedback. The result was product inconsistency, duplication, and — in some cases — algorithms that generated so many false positives that frontline fire managers had stopped using them. $120 million in new federal money was now sitting on the table, with the fire season approaching, and no integrated system or accountable team to spend it well.
What They Tried — and Why It Wasn't Enough
The fire product problem was not new, and NESDIS had not ignored it. Program managers had attempted to coordinate between the GOES-R and JPSS science teams. There had been internal working groups, planning meetings, and strategy documents. But the agency's siloed acquisition structure worked against every attempt at integration: each satellite program had its own funding line, its own science leads, and its own incentives — none of which pointed toward collaboration. What was missing was 26 of the agency's best fire-domain minds — including the external users whose frustrations had never been heard inside a NESDIS meeting room — working the problem together with a shared mandate.
Question
NESDIS had $120 million in new federal funding, a fast-approaching fire season, and satellite capabilities that no other agency could match — but no integrated system, no accountable team, and a siloed culture that had repeatedly agreed on priorities and then failed to act on them.
Answer
MMG convened 26 participants over three days via Zoom and MURAL on March 29–31, 2022: scientists, engineers, program managers, and policy staff from across NESDIS, two National Weather Service physical scientists, an NOAA research director, an EPA director, an IT specialist from NOAA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, and a senior lead from The Aerospace Corporation. Six topics — Impact Mindset, Whole Customer View, Transformation, How We Work, Communication, and Governance — were designed so that the fire challenge would be solved from every angle simultaneously.
Output
NESDIS leadership left with unanimous support from all 26 participants and three things the $120 million in new federal funding had not automatically provided:
- A unified fire system playbook — anchored by the empowerment of Mike Pavolonis as Fire Program Manager with a dedicated tiger team, clarified roles and responsibilities across the NOAA enterprise, and a plan to integrate the fire information system into the NESDIS cloud and project portfolio management framework.
- A community of practice and co-development model — bringing fire-domain power users, including NWS field forecasters, EPA partners, and commercial operators, into the product development cycle as co-developers, closing the feedback loop that had allowed ineffective algorithms to persist for years.
- A test-and-learn execution strategy — a DevOps campaign to rapidly deploy improved capabilities for the 2022 fire season and a proving ground model for fire and smoke innovation. The Next Generation Fire System achieved 90% voluntary adoption across NWS Weather Forecast Offices by early 2025, with detection down to a quarter-acre and alert times as fast as one minute.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did $120 million in new federal funding fail to solve a problem that had existed for years?
Money creates capacity; it doesn't create alignment. NESDIS had two parallel satellite programs — GOES-R and JPSS — each with its own science leads, funding lines, and incentive structures, none of which pointed toward integration. New funding made the dysfunction more visible and more urgent, but it didn't change the underlying structure. What was missing was a shared mandate built by the people who would have to execute it — including the external users whose frustrations had never been heard inside a NESDIS planning meeting.
Why were external users — NWS forecasters and EPA partners — included in an internal product strategy session?
Because they were the ones who knew which products weren't working. Algorithms that generated so many false positives that frontline fire managers had stopped using them had persisted for years precisely because there was no feedback loop between the people building the products and the people using them. Including external users in the session wasn't a courtesy — it was a structural design choice to close that loop and prevent the same problem from recurring in the products the new funding would build.
What made the Next Generation Fire System achieve 90% voluntary adoption when previous products struggled?
Voluntary adoption at that scale is the result of two things: products that actually work for the people using them, and those users having had a hand in defining what "works" means. The community of practice and co-development model that came out of the MMG session brought NWS forecasters, EPA partners, and commercial operators into the product development cycle as co-developers — not as end-users briefed after the fact. That's a different kind of buy-in than training rollout produces.
How do you get unanimous support from 26 scientists and engineers on anything?
By designing the session so that the output reflects what participants actually concluded rather than what leadership wanted to hear. Unanimous support doesn't mean everyone agreed on every detail — it means the process surfaced disagreement, worked through it, and produced recommendations that everyone could endorse. The governance structure that came out of the session — empowering a single Fire Program Manager with a dedicated team and clarified roles across the NOAA enterprise — resolved the accountability ambiguity that had allowed the previous fragmentation to persist.