The design and evaluation of a measure of forecast consistency for the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product

Airline dispatchers and other groups, many of whom are not trained as meteorologists, are constantly forced to make decisions based upon their interpretations of numerous guidance products and tools that have been created to help the decision-making process. One product in particular, the Collaborative Convective Forecast Product (CCFP) was created to help to unify airline operations around a cohesive set of forecasts that are well-understood and well-defined. Even though the decision-makers may be focused on a limited set of forecast products like the CCFP these products are updated every few hours. The updates present a great challenge to them; in particular how to interpret the situations when forecast areas may appear and disappear during the 2, 4, and 6 hour forecast lengths of the CCFP.

To this end a procedure has been developed which assesses the spatial consistency of the CCFP as a forecaster would view it. Tools are developed to present the information to the users in a very efficient manner to allow them to rapidly assess and visualize the consistency between a series of CCFP forecasts valid at the same time. Forecast verification information will be presented to determine whether or not forecasts which are more consistent are more accurate. Recent work in the field of numerical weather prediction suggests that caution is warranted when associating forecast stationarity with accuracy. Discussion will focus on the utility of this new approach and the importance of not relying on forecast consistency alone when attempting to make decisions based upon the forecasts themselves.