Weather Ready Research to Operations Brief Guidelines
These guidelines are intended for recipients of the Research to Operations Award: Moving Weather Ready Research Findings and Data Into Operations.
Overview
Awardees will submit a 1,500-word Research to Operations Brief that will be published on the Natural Hazards Center's website. Your brief should concisely describe your project, including its objectives, community or organizational partners, and activities and outcomes. Additionally, your brief should feature your reflections on the project’s strengths and weaknesses and outline any lessons that your team learned during the project.
Brief Template
Download the Brief Template below and save it as a Word document. The template has pre-formatted headings and instructions that will help you create your brief. Scroll to the end of the document for a checklist of all our style requirements. Please review this checklist prior to submitting your final brief to ensure it complies with our guidelines.
Required Project Materials
Your brief must include an example of materials that you developed during the project, such as a training manual, promotional materials, webpage, or video. These materials must also be made publicly available. The purpose of this requirement is to encourage awardees to share project outputs that may be of interest to the public or project materials that other practitioners could use as models in their own work.
The item you submit for this purpose will vary from awardee to awardee depending on your project’s main activities. For example, if your project’s main activity is a webinar, you could share a video of the webinar, or, if you do a community training, you could share the training manual. You are welcome to share more than one project material if you prefer.
You can find more examples of project materials that awardees submitted for a similar award program by clicking on the briefs listed here. Please contact haz.research.awards@colorado.edu if you have any questions about this requirement.
Brief Due Date
A draft of your Research to Operations Brief is due September 17, 2025, six months after award activation. Submit your brief as a Word document (with photos submitted as separate JPG or PNG files) to the Natural Hazards Center at haz.research.awards@colorado.edu. Please do not submit your brief before reading the submission guidelines in full.
Peer Review Process and Final Submission
After submitting your draft brief, it will enter our review and copyediting process. The list below describes the steps in this process and important dates.
- Peer Review. Two reviewers will read your brief and provide recommendations for revision.
- Revised Brief. You will be asked to submit a revised version of your brief within two to four weeks of receiving reviewer feedback. Authors of briefs requiring major revisions will be given four weeks to revise their draft.
- Copyediting. The Natural Hazards Center staff will copyedit the revised draft and return edits to authors for final review.
- Final Brief. You will review the copyedited brief, approve and make requested changes, and submit a final draft. The final draft will be due two weeks after you receive the copyedited version.
- Publication. The Natural Hazards Center staff will then work to publish your brief online with any photos, images, or multimedia items that are included in your submission.
Style Guide
Before you start writing, please review our Natural Hazards Center Publication Style Guide. The style guide answers frequently asked questions about our writing style and explains how to format tables, figures, block quotes, appendices, and more. Briefs that do not follow the style guide will be returned to the author for further revision.
Author Bios
Prior to submitting your final brief, please make sure all authors submit a biography, photo, and current email address using this online form.
Project Photos and Other Multimedia
We strongly encourage you to submit photos, images, videos, or other multimedia depicting your project. Such items will help illustrate the value of applying your research while also making your online brief more visually appealing. If your photos or videos include identifiable images of project participants, you must obtain their permission to share their image online.
For guidance on taking photos, please read this list of tips on Photography Basics for Researchers from the CONVERGE Extreme Events Research Check Sheets. You may submit up to 10 photos or images depicting your project site or activities. Due to space limitations, we may not be able to include all submissions. All photos or images should be attached as separate image files, such as JPG or PNG, and not embedded in the Word document.
If you would like to incorporate other types of multimedia in your brief, please review the CONVERGE check sheets on Multimedia for Researchers: Techniques and Ethics and Videography Basics for Researchers. Please contact haz.research.awards@colorado.edu for information on how to submit multimedia items.
Questions?
If you have any questions, please contact the Natural Hazards Center team at haz.research.awards@colorado.edu.
Acknowledgements
The Public Health Disaster Research Award Program is based on work supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) through supplemental funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF Award #1635593). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CDC, NSF, or Natural Hazards Center.