The Scientific Services Division is responsible for the level of meteorological science practiced at Southern Region field offices. In effect, SSD's mission is to work with forecasters to make sure their forecasts and warnings are as good as the state of the science and operational technology will allow. To do that, SSD focusses its activities in three areas:

• Professional Development. Various training and professional development activities involve arranging and conducting local workshops, providing training resources, scientific consultation, one-on-one training, and so on. The SOO program--Science and Operations Officer--at each WFO provides a local leader who will work with SSD in this area. SSD is also responsible for providing leadership for the Forecaster Development Program, by which new forecasters enter the NWS ranks.
  
• Scientific Collaboration. SSD collaborates with the university community to develop closer links among forecasters and the academic and research communities to ensure those groups are aware of NWS operational capabilities and needs, and to facilitate the transfer of new techniques and technology into operational forecasting.
  
• Techniques Development. SSD develops new techniques and explores new ways to apply the latest technology to operational problems. Examples include developing a procedure for manually digitizing radar data, an automated warning composition program for use on personal computers, new computer-based data analysis procedures, and some of the earliest field applications of high resolution numerical weather forecast model output. All of these have become widely used by forecasters in the Southern Region, as well as nation-wide.