Integration of the Warning Decision Support System - Integrated Information (WDSS-II) into the NOAA Storm Prediction Center

The Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), and the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) are collaborating on a project to experimentally integrate NSSL's WDSS-II software into the SPC. The goal of this project, funded on a grant from the NOAA High Performance Computing and Communications program, is to develop a communications management system for WDSS-II that allows SPC forecasters to choose a 1000km x 1000km x 20km domain of merged weather data anywhere over the conterminous United States. These "severe storm domains" contain a WDSS-II generated 4-D analysis of real-time radar, satellite, synoptic observations, and numerical weather prediction model data, including merged WDSS-II radar algorithm information from NEXRAD Level II data (tornado, mesocyclone, hail, etc. detection algorithms). The SPC seeks to integrate the WDSS-II software into experimental operations, and research the use of WDSS-II products for improving convective watch lead time, analysis of on-going convection, and interrogation of case studies by the operational forecast and research staff. Through the use of a custom-designed graphical user interface, SPC will choose an appropriate domain, and then once chosen, the software will dynamically restart a WDSS-II server and send the necessary metadata over a network to a visualization machine. Testing of this software is expected during the summer of 2004, and we anticipate archiving several meteorological cases to illustrate how the custom software was used to provide WDSS-II information to SPC for experimental purposes.