Expansion of NWS AFS Office’s Requirement Development Mission for Analysis and Forecasting Tools from Regional Systems to Global Systems and from Modeling to Non-Modeling Tools

The Analysis and Nowcast Branch in NWS’ Analyze, Forecast, and Support Office’s (a.k.a. AFS11) primary mission has been focusing on addressing the field’s needs on Analysis and Nowcasting systems by evaluating field’s needs and developing requirements on analysis, nowcasting or short-term modeling and post-processing systems. Some systems AFS11 deals with, however, already span beyond the short-term range (e.g., National Blend of Models or NBM). Our initial focus has been on regional modeling systems such as the Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis / UnRestricted Mesoscale Analysis systems (RTMA/URMA), the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh / [Low-Resolution] Rapid Refresh systems (HRRR/RAP), the High-Resolution Ensemble Forecast System (HREF), the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System (MRMS), and the NBM.

In the meantime, we have recognized the field’s need for global forecast systems while investigating the sources of the deficiencies of regional models that are impacted by global models’ performances and also while participating in various meetings where developers and forecasters discussed model shortcomings. In fact, the US Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) community demands an effective way to consolidate the community's needs on improved performance of the US forecast models in general. Evidence of this can be found in, e.g., MAP listserv postings. The leadership of the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) of NWS noted that AFS11 can play a role in this task through modeling requirements and thus requested AFS11 to develop requirements for global systems such as Global [Ensemble] Forecast System or G[E]FS.

In addition, the recent change in NWS’ strategic direction guides us to expand the branch’s work scope to also cover non-modeling tools such as weather data dissemination tools (e.g., Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System or AWIPS). AWIPS is going through significant changes, including migration to a cloud-based system, and AFS11 earlier developed modeling requirements relevant to AWIPS capabilities. The “AWIPS functionality” is an important topic discussed at our milestone planning meetings. On the other hand, AFS11’s functional statement includes non-modeling tools to be surveyed and recommended for further investment, and related milestones are being developed.

This presentation will brief the progress of AFS11’s effort to address the field's additional needs on global modeling systems and non-modeling tools. For the global systems, we will share sample field cases revealing model deficiencies and present a few key questions to be asked by a field survey, which will serve as the basis for developing requirements. For non-modeling tools, we will present our preliminary investigation on the types of tools and its progress.

This talk will also serve as an introduction to the session topic “Advances in R2O & O2R with Analysis and Forecasting Systems, Technologies, and Methodologies, Linking between Solutions and Requirements to Address Field’s Forecasting Needs” of the 14th Conference on the Transition of Research to Operations.