Checking Your Business Readiness for Severe Weather Threats

No registration fee!

Registration is 8:00-8:30.   Presentation begins at 8:30.

Presentation: Checking Your Business Readiness for Severe Weather Threats

PEP is excited to have two of Kansas City's most well respected meteorologists conduct this important session.  Sara Croke (Weather or Not, Inc.) and Joe Lauria (Fox 4 Weather, WDAF-TV) will team up to conduct an interactive workshop that will give attendees the emergency planning tools and ideas they can take back to their operations centers as they prepare for severe weather.

The session will include:

• Weather Operations Audit - How to analyze your company's process for making and executing weather decisions that affect safety, profits, and brand management.
• Brush up on your weather forecasting tools - GOES 16, the latest and why it's the greatest in satellite imagery along with the websites and radar apps that many professionals use.
• If it Happened Here, How Would Your Business Recover? - The Greensburg tornado laid over Kansas City Metro, including impacts, will be looked at to understand the depth and breadth of the recovery challenges.

The workshop will include interactive discussions, demonstrations, and opportunities for Q&A. Bring your questions, and be ready to learn from two of Kansas City's best meteorologists. 

Our Presenters:

Sara Croke - President - Weather or Not, Inc. (WeatherorNot.com)

Sara was enjoying a successful career in broadcast meteorology when George Toma, the Head Groundskeeper of the Kansas City Royals, noticed Sara’s keen ability to accurately predict weather conditions and rainouts at Kauffman Stadium. At the same time, Sara began to observe how contractors, airports and public works departments were losing money to guessing how the weather would affect their operations. Shortly after successfully forecasting the 1985 World Series for Toma, Sara left television to begin a private consulting company, Weather or Not, to help organizations affected by the weather, become more efficient.

Over the past 26 years, Sara has successfully built Weather or Not into the Midwest’s leading weather consulting firm. She has learned that accurate weather prediction can save money and improve safety for her clients. With an emphasis on personal service, she and her staff of meteorologists provide accurate, custom, 24/7 forecasts and updates for businesses—no matter the industry. Creating cutting-edge solutions for her clients, Sara developed A+ Weather Alerts, the first location-based weather information alerting system in the country.

Combining her 30+ years of experience in weather and her expertise in pre-disaster communications, Sara is now a sought-after industry speaker and author, becoming a catalyst to inspire great organizations.

Joe Lauria - Weekend Meteorologist - Fox 4 (fox4kc.com)  

In 1984, Joe graduated from St. Louis University with a bachelor’s degree in meteorology. He joined Fox 4 in January 1995, but weather has been an important part of his life since childhood. Growing up in New York, Joe remembers being fascinated by clouds and snowstorms at the age of 10. Winter remains his favorite weather season because of those hard-to-forecast snowstorms.
Joe was chief meteorologist at KOSA-TV in Midland, Texas for six years. It was there that the Associated Press voted him the best weathercaster of the year for the state of Texas. He also has been chief meteorologist at WAYK-TV in Orlando, Florida and KFKF-FM in Kansas City and WCEE-TV in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. Over the years he’s done local radio forecasts for KMBZ-AM and WHB-AM. He was named president of the KC Chapter of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) for both 2001-02 and 2002- 03, and again in 2014 and has been Vice President from 2008-2013… and also is a member of the National Weather Association (NWA). Both organizations have given him their Seal of Approval for excellence in weather broadcasting. He also has been awarded the highest honor possible for a TV meteorologist when he obtained the Certified Broadcast Meteorologist (CBM) designation from the AMS, which fewer than 650 people have.

Please pass the invitation on to your colleagues.

Registration is 8:00-8:30.   Presentation begins at 8:30.

Go to www.pepkc.org to get more info about PEP!