14th Weather Squadron

Mission 
Collect, protect, and exploit authoritative climate data to develop competitive advantages for the DoD, Intelligence Community, and NATO.

Vision
Provide a competitive edge via the most advanced authoritative climate data and exploitation

Personnel and Resources
The 14th Weather Squadron is co-located with the National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly the National Climatic Data Center) as part of the Federal Climate Complex in Asheville, North Carolina. They are a 64-member unit with a mix of military and civilian specialists across three flights; a Climate Operations Flight, Climate Data Flight, and a Systems Flight. As the sole active duty military unit in western North Carolina, our Special Ceremonies Team fulfills traditional Honor Guard and Color Guard duties throughout the region.

Operations
The 14 WS is the USAF's only climate operations organization and owner of the DoD's only climatological archive. The environmental intelligence and subject matter expertise provided by the 14 WS contributes to strategic, operational, and tactical planning, development, acquisition, infrastructure, forensics, and information warfare. These activities are enabled by a highly specialized system of systems and Airmen collecting, quality controlling, and storing 3 million global weather observations per day. Climate experts analyze and provide tailored support to monitor observed climate anomalies, predict when and where near-term oscillations will impact the normal patterns, and provide long-term projections that account for a changing climate. A team of cyber operators develop, operate, and safeguard the automated tools, databases, and backups for data that exists nowhere else on the planet.

(Current as of August 2022)