Continuing Warning Decision Assessments with Enhanced Simulations: Incorporating WES-in-the-Cloud

As part of 2020-2021 Spring Readiness Training (SRT) campaigns, WFO Norman implemented Weather Event Simulator (WES)-2 Bridge simulations with enhanced forecaster-evaluation capabilities. A total of six 1-hour long self-guided enhanced simulations automatically exported forecaster-issued warnings for post-simulation evaluation. This provided training officers unique opportunities to review individual and forecaster unit warning proficiency and assess performance while identifying biases and training gaps. In an effort to share access to these simulations, explore novel ways to export and deploy training, and to supplement previous work, WFO Norman partnered with the Warning Decision Training Division and the Cloud WES and Archive System Testing Team to participate in a National Weather Service (NWS) Office of Science and Technology Integration opportunity for cloud computing. Funding was secured to operate six “WES-in-the-Cloud” instances to provide enhanced simulations to a wider community of meteorologists at participating WFOs in Fort Worth, Wichita, Tulsa, Midland, Lubbock, and San Angelo. Throughout the project, which spanned fiscal year 2022 and early 2023, data were collected on 193 simulations. Participants praised the ease of cloud-based access, delivery, and simulation design. Preliminary analyses of the simulations have provided insight on warning performance, and have unlocked potential further research on aggregated simulated forecaster decision making. Important early findings include unexpected variances in tornado warning issuance times for classic tornadic supercells. Further, technical challenges encountered during the project enabled improvements to IT infrastructure, which have proven instrumental in preparing the NWS for cloud-based training and data delivery.