Generating Storm Surge Hazards in Hazard Services

In line with the NOAA 5-year R&D Plan Objectives, the Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) in collaboration with the National Hurricane Center (NHC) undertook an effort to modernize the workflow of the Storm Surge Watch/Warning (SSWW) which is an operational product issued by the NHC conveying the risk of a location experiencing life-threatening inundation from a tropical cyclone. Given the demonstrated successes of Hazard Services (HS) at the Weather Forecast Office (WFO) level, the NHC identified HS as the vehicle to facilitate workflow and product modernization of the SSWW. HS builds in the ability to inform product generation by using scientifically-based inputs along with the ability to generate flexible outputs that advance how hazardous weather information is disseminated and communicated for a hyper-local threat such as storm surge. The input identified to inform product generation of the SSWW in this project is the Potential Storm Surge Flooding Graphic (PSSFG) which is a high-resolution geospatial depiction of potential inundation derived from post-processed probabilistic storm surge information. This project has evolved through time as forecaster feedback from evaluations at the Hurricane and Oceans Testbed has been incorporated into the software development process. This presentation will cover the current status of the project including the software advancements that have been made over the course of the past year along with the plan for operationalizing the software.